Lightning on the Sun: A Novel - Hardcover

Bingham, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385488564 ISBN 13: 9780385488563

Publisher: Doubleday, 2000

Synopsis

Asher is in trouble. He's washed up in Phnom Penh, the UNESCO monument-preservation work has dried up, and he's at the end of his spiritual and financial ropes. But highest-quality heroin is wonderfully cheap in this dangerous and corrupt part of the world.

So with funds borrowed from the loan-sharking massage parlor owner Mr. Hawk and the aid of journalist and "citizen" Reese as an unwitting mule, he plans to move some weight to New York, where supply will happily meet demand.

His partner in this plan is Julie, his once and future love, a beautiful Harvard-educated dabbler in trendy nihilism and fashionable marginalization, currently working behind the bar at Stopless, a downtown strip club. It's all been carefully worked out, but when Julie decides to improvise, the plans swiftly and dangerously unravel in ways that will put the lives of these three complexly flawed young Americans in mortal danger.

Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun is a beautifully plotted and written novel with the fast-paced suspense of a thriller and the moral resonance and exotic setting of one of Graham Greene's classic works. The novel's sense of place, whether steamy Phnom Penh or bustling New York or a leafy New England prep school, is unerring, as is its sense of postmodern moral compromise and the disillusioning ways of the world. It offers an exhilarating read; the literary legacy of one of his generation's most gifted writers.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Bingham was the author of the highly praised short story collection Pure Slaughter Value. He held an M.F.A. from Columbia and was a founding editor of the literary magazine Open City. His fiction and nonfiction appeared in The New Yorker, and he worked for two years as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily. He died in 1999.

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for Lightning on the Sun:

"Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun is a beautifully written tale of adventure in the Conradian tradition. Following that tradition, it treats with moral ambiguity and collapse in fateful tropic places where late imperial Americans and Europeans encounter and continue a degenerate version of the great games of history. Missionaries, do-gooders, criminals and adventurers from the outside prey on and are preyed upon by the inhabitants of the lands they would exploit in a cycle of violence and mutual corruption. Witty, highly sophisticated and richly entertaining, it is bursting with life-affirming energy that overlays a tragic vision. Robert Bingham has given us a superb novel."
--Robert Stone

"Terrifying action/pitiful land/pitiable characters/terrible situation--Aristotle couldn't have asked for a better mix of terror and pity."
--P.J. O'Rourke

"Robert Bingham's novel vividly narrates the story of a young American struggling to find himself amid the chaos, corruption, and danger that currently pervade Cambodia. It is tragic that Bingham died before he could enjoy the praise he so richly deserves."
--Stanley Karnow

"Robert Bingham was a young master whose novel--which reads like a poem and moves like a thriller--shifts locale with confident ease. Lightning on the Sun shines an uncompromising light on contemporary life. His characters respond to the world in a way that is both appalling and natural. Bingham's work is the lost heir to Graham Greene and Robert Stone."
--Chris Offutt

"Lightning on the Sun slammed into me like no other novel since Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and no other expatriate fiction before that since Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It's as if Robert Bingham swallowed the world whole and proceeded to sweat out its wickedness and moral dissolution into literary perfection. In Mr. Bingham's whipsaw prose, the underside of the empire that is us--America in the '90s--has finally found--and just as quickly lost--its truest, most unforgiving voice. Hip, arrogant, brilliantly successful, lethally nihilistic. This novel leaves me in permanent awe, and permanent mourning."
--Bob Shacochis

From the Inside Flap

trouble. He's washed up in Phnom Penh, the UNESCO monument-preservation work has dried up, and he's at the end of his spiritual and financial ropes. But highest-quality heroin is wonderfully cheap in this dangerous and corrupt part of the world.

So with funds borrowed from the loan-sharking massage parlor owner Mr. Hawk and the aid of journalist and "citizen" Reese as an unwitting mule, he plans to move some weight to New York, where supply will happily meet demand.

His partner in this plan is Julie, his once and future love, a beautiful Harvard-educated dabbler in trendy nihilism and fashionable marginalization, currently working behind the bar at Stopless, a downtown strip club. It's all been carefully worked out, but when Julie decides to improvise, the plans swiftly and dangerously unravel in ways that will put the lives of these three complexly flawed young Americans in mortal danger.

Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun is a beautifu

Reviews

An American expat in Cambodia with a burgeoning drug problem--and deepening debts to a murderous Phnom Penh loan shark--tries to smuggle three kilos of heroin to his ex-girlfriend, a "lapsed Harvard graduate" and stripper in New York City, by enlisting the unwitting help of a preppy newspaper journalist in this engrossing, posthumous debut. Asher has come to Phnom Penh with UNESCO, hoping to put as much distance as possible between himself and Julie, the love of his life. Now she's the only one who has both the connections and the desire to save him. But after Asher tricks Reese, a respectable tennis club acquaintance (he "looked like the drunk American in La Dolce Vita") into taking the drugs through U.S. customs, the plan starts to unravel, thanks to a series of suspenseful, stylishly written double crosses that take the action from Gramercy Park to Harlem and from smalltown New England back to Cambodia, where Bingham delivers an equally stylish ending. As in his story collection (Pure Slaughter Value), Bingham stands out here as a hip traditionalist, elegantly updating the conventions of Graham Greene and Robert Stone, and as a knowing chronicler of high-WASP misbehavior. For all its wit and verve, though, the novel is impossible to read outside the shadow of Bingham's own death, last November, from a heroin overdose. It's not just that substance abuse looms so large in the lives of all his main characters, but that underneath their jaundiced dialogue and flippant derring-do--"Friends of friends had been found dead in their beds. Julie got the bill, rolled, and snorted it up"--they seem frightened of, and trapped in, their own recklessness. This is a melancholy triumph from a writer who might have become one of the strongest of his generation. (May) FYI: Bingham worked as a reporter for the Cambodian Daily and was a founding editor of the literary magazine Open City.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Asher is an expatriate American living in Cambodia in this first novel by Bingham, who died last year. A former UNESCO employee who stayed after the UNESCO monument preservation work ended, Asher is at the end of his rope financially and spiritually. Looking to finance his way back to America, he masterminds a heroin deal with the help of Julie, his ex-girlfriend in New York, and enlists Reese, a straight-arrow journalist, to carry the package from Cambodia. Things go wrong from the start, however, when soldiers rob him on his way to buy the drug, forcing him to borrow money from a loan shark. Then Julie double-crosses her boss, the person for whom the package is intended, putting Reese's life in danger. Whether writing of exotic Phnom Penh or the streets of New York, Bingham portrays a world of absolute corruption where moral compromise is the key to survival. Recommended for larger public libraries.
-Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After three-and-a-half years in Phnom Penh, Asher fears that if he doesn't get out very soon, he never will. Once a UNESCO monument restoration specialist, he's become just another Westerner morally eroded in the fierce heat, tragedy, and violence of Southeast Asia. To get out, he buys five kilos of world-class heroin and arranges to make an American journalist an unwitting mule. In New York, his former girlfriend, sexy, willful Julie, will sell it to her boss, and she and Asher will resume their destructive affair. But Julie ad-libs a new plan--putting herself, Asher, and the journalist into final jeopardy. What is it about Asia that morally erodes Westerners? Bingham doesn't break any new ground, but he joins some outstanding literary forebears: Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and Robert Stone, were all inspired by dissolution in the Asian tropics. Tragically, Bingham died in 1999, at age 33. This skillfully written and gripping tale is a worthy legacy. Thomas Gaughan

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Asher waited for the bats. The little rats, he thought, where the fuck were they? All day long the bats took shelter in the eaves of the National Museum, waiting for dusk, waiting for the heat to die. Asher paced. The bats were late, and to be late on this particular evening was unsettling. Bad luck, bad karma, bad what? He did not know. He paced his porch, sweating. Asher's porch had a commanding view of the National Museum. It faced east and received good light in the late afternoon. At around six o'clock, give or take twenty minutes depending on the season, the bats took to the local skies in a great cloud of squealing motion.

When it came to his life in Phnom Penh, there were few things of which Asher was proud. One was his third-floor porch with its view of the museum and its back gardens; another was his Honda Dream; and the last was a rule he'd never broken: no drinking until the bats flew. He checked his watch. It was a little past six-thirty.

"Fuck," said Asher.

This evening was of considerable consequence for him and he badly needed a drink. It was late March and windless. The dry heat of January and February had intensified into stupefying weather, and though they were more than two months away, already he'd begun to pray for the rains.

Asher had originally arrived in Phnom Penh as part of a UNESCO restoration team. His first assignment had been the thankless chore of cleaning bat shit off Khmer statues housed in the National Museum. Back then he had been no friend to the bats and their shit. He'd quickly fallen into the camp of "preservation experts" that wanted to see the bats driven from the rafters. His ally in this camp was a Pakistani who would smoke anything handed him, and who like Asher had washed up in Phnom Penh for easy UN money and to get away from a woman.

It evolved that the French preservation community was quite fond of the bats and their shit. From their UNESCO compound computers they spewed memos in nearly perfect English arguing that to rob the bats of their "indigenous setting" would be cruel and unusual. Apparently the National Museum bats weren't just any bats. They were a rare species. Besides, the French argued, it was charming how a handful of the natives were making a good living selling organic fertilizer derived from the bat shit. The debate raged for nearly eight months and engendered a surprising amount of ill will and accusatory letters to the editor in the two local English-language newspapers. The French eventually prevailed, and Asher and his ally Alex were kicked up north to the town of Siem Reap, where they helped reconstruct the earthquake-damaged Elephant Wall, an infuriatingly complicated Khmer bulwark that had fallen into several hundred pieces some centuries ago. The pay was better in Siem Reap, but eventually the two friends, Asher and Alex, fell out with their project supervisor, a pedophile from Rotterdam with a yen for his young Khmer employees. Alex went into the hotel business and Asher into almost nothing at all.

Through his Nikon binoculars Asher watched a lovely Khmer woman he'd nicknamed Lovely Lane Lily sweep the pathways that meandered through the museum's gardens. Ordinarily this view of Lily would be standard enough but tonight he needed her more than ever because her serenity was a powerful antidote to the transaction upon which he was about to embark. Lily was as stunning as ever. She wore a baby-blue dress and looked like a sexy nurse. It had white buttons down the front and was cut fairly low to the breasts by Khmer standards. It had a nice slit at the back. Asher watched Lily sweep. Unlike Asher and the country at large, Lily was at peace, at peace with herself and her work. Asher wondered if she'd ever slept with one of King Sihanouk's many offspring. The Royalists and their FUNCINPEC party--oh, how they'd blown it. It was really kind of sad to see how that murderous bastard of a fascist dictator Hun Sen had muscled them out of power despite the Royalists' victory in the UN-sponsored election. The only ministries FUNCINPEC now controlled were Tourism and Culture. The National Museum was one of the few undisputed bastions of Royalist patronage. The employees were said to be hired for their looks and nepotistic connections to the royal family. It was considered a good job.

Asher put the binoculars away and wiped the sweat from his brow. He walked into his kitchen, drew a bottle of Stolichnaya from his freezer, and returned to the porch. Tonight it would be necessary not to get drunk. He poured a measure into his water glass and waited. The city was nearly silent but for the distant hissing of street stalls and the clattering yelps of his landlord's children playing soccer on the street below. Heads of green palm trees were catching the orange light from the river. It was a windless dusk.

Nervous and impatient, Asher lit a cigarette. The day had dragged horrendously. He'd had breakfast at a noodle stall at the foot of Wat Phnom, where he'd been harangued by street urchins and amputees. An elderly man had offered him an elephant ride. The elephant of Wat Phnom was drugged and lumbered around the circular hill occasionally carrying intrepid tourists.

Asher had arrived at the Bank Indo-Suez five minutes before opening. Standing in the blinding courtyard light he'd felt stupid and criminal. The guards had eyed him suspiciously. Phnom Penh was a secretive town, and when hungover, Asher was susceptible to the distrusts and paranoias that informed the place. The bank had been his only errand of the day, and with it over well before noon, he'd had nothing to do but return to his apartment and wait--wait and try not to drink. When he stood up to put something on his stereo, the bats suddenly took to the skies.

"There you are, you little rats," he said, draining his glass. "I don't know what I see in you."

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385488564
• ISBN 13: 9780385488563
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304