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Dr Siri really would like to retire. He is, after all, seventy-four, he came more than close to dying a few months ago, and he yearns to spend his days eating his wife's noodles and reading French literature in his illegal backroom library. But when pressed into service one more time, he reluctantly agrees, provided he can take his wife Daeng, his nurse Dtui, her husband, his morgue assistant Geung, and his best friend Civilai on a mission to recover the remains of an airman, MIA in northern Laos. What, after all, could go wrong with an expense-paid week in the cool mountain air? Plenty can and plenty does. First of all, Auntie Bpoo, the cross-dressing fortune-teller who has decorated several earlier novels in the series, attaches herself to the party, only to inform Dr Siri that his days are distinctly numbered - indeed, he has only five of them left. As the expedition continues, fuelled by Jack Daniels and meals-ready-to-eat, it begins to look as though Auntie Bpoo knows what s/he's talking about. The search for the remains of the fallen airman, the son of a US senator grown rapidly rich in the course of the recently concluded war in Vietnam, yields plenty of opportunity for Siri to comment in his gently sardonic way about the various horrors visited on his country in the name of the fight for freedom. Some readers express a resistance to the mystical elements in the series, especially in the earlier novels. These are modestly present in SLASH AND BURN, but, as in the previous SONGS FROM A SHALLOW GRAVE, the more evident ghosts are those that any skeptic can give credence to - the lingering ghosts of war, of napalm, Agent Orange, cluster bombs and the like that scarred the landscape in 1978, when this book is set, and that persist today, more than thirty years later. Remarkably Cotterill can present a clear-eyed account of this tragic damage while still writing a book that is often very funny. The key to this apparent paradox is not cynicism on the part of the author, but the product of a cool detachment born of age and experience on the part of Siri and Civilai. They have seen far too much to be anything but dubious of appearances. As they sit overlooking the Plain of Jars, they are viewing an archaeological enigma on the order of Stonehenge and a landscape off-limits to tourists (as it largely remains) salted as it is with unexploded mines. Why not speculate that the jars are not burial sites but stills in a vast and ancient whisky production line? Such speculation is neither less reverent nor more absurd than what has happened to the Plain of Jars in the 20th century. Many writers, having reached, as Cotterill has, the eighth in a series, slip into cruise control and turn out variations on a successful theme. It is a particular temptation for series set in exotic locations and filled with local colour. But it is one that Cotterill has successfully resisted. SLASH AND BURN is as good as or better than any of the previous entries. I have no hesitation in encouraging newcomers to the series to start here if you care to. This book is complete in itself and I suspect that if it is the first Dr Siri you read, it will not be the last. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2012
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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