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Smoking Poppy
by Graham Joyce
(Victor Gollancz, £12.99, 227 pages, hardback; published 18
October 2001. US edition published by Pocket Books.)
Sometimes you wonder at an author's choice of character name...
Graham Joyce's Smoking Poppy opens with Danny Innes desperately
wanting Charlie back. The  Charlie
he craves is, it turns out, his daughter and not a Category A drug,
but the fact that the Charlie in question (Danny's daughter) is in a
Thai jail on drug charges makes you wonder why one of the main characters
in this wonderfully tense and revelatory novel should have a bad pun
for a name, and, if it wasn't deliberate, why didn't an editor at least
question the choice? A minor point, perhaps, but distracting to the
reader, raising unnecessary questions about what to expect from the
book.
Danny is separated from his wife and living in bachelor squalor in
a cold apartment amid piled-high clothes and half-assembled flatpack
furniture. He's a fortysomething who has let things drift and doesn't
really understand why things aren't so good any more. Joyce pins down
the "British Bloke" perfectly in the pages of this novel. Danny has
acquaintances he sometimes likes and sometimes doesn't, one of whom
he doesn't even realize is his best friend. He uses games like snooker
and pub quizzes as a substitute for really socializing -- he
goes out with people and yet they always have Things To Do (pot the
ball, answer the question) which stop them from having to communicate
with each other.
In Danny Innes, Joyce provides a wonderfully engaging portrait of
a man trying to connect: with a daughter who has become a woman; with
a son who has Found God; with a younger generation altogether; with
a world that is just a little beyond his grasp. As if that weren't enough,
Charlie's plight throws Danny into a world far removed from the one
he knows: a journey to urban Thailand at first, and then into the opium-growing
heart of the country, a land of jungle, armed gangs and strange local
beliefs. If Danny can't really cope with his own world, how on earth
will he manage here?
Is this genre fiction, you may be wondering, or has Joyce moved into
the mainstream ghetto? There are demons in this book, evil spirits that
stalk Danny on his quest; but they are subtle demons, and could easily
be the demons in our heads, the ones that stalk us all. Genre or not,
the answer really shouldn't matter, of course: Smoking Poppy
is a quest novel in the best possible sense of the description -- the
story of a man's quest to know himself, a quest that takes him halfway
around the world but which also takes him far greater distances within
his own head. It is a fine piece of work.
Review by Keith
Brooke.
Elsewhere in infinity
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