Saint Jack

I read Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack years ago when I was in junior col­lege, and enjoyed it partly because I thought it was banned. I only found out this morn­ing that it was never on the MDA’s banned wagon. (Thank you Ram­bling Librar­ian for set­ting me straight)

But if I were to re-read the book, I think I’d still come off feel­ing the same glee (you know? the tee hee hee kind?) at read­ing about a brothel named ‘Serene House’, sit­u­ated near the then PM’s house on Oxley Road (although in real­ity, it’s the name of a clus­ter of apart­ment blocks off Far­rer Road).

Saint Jack is set in Sin­ga­pore in the 70s (it was writ­ten in the 70s too), where Ther­oux taught for a stint at the then SU (Sin­ga­pore Uni­ver­sity), shar­ing the fac­ulty with local literati such as <a href=“http://www.nus.edu.sg/NUSinfo/CFA/Prof” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘http://www.nus.edu.sg’]);“s/”>Edwin Thumboo. A friend of mine had a step­mother who met Ther­oux dur­ing his stay in Sin­ga­pore, and she once men­tioned that he was a ‘dif­fi­cult per­son to get along with’. Appar­ently, the feel­ing was mutual, and Ther­oux used some of his col­leagues’ names as the names of char­ac­ters in his novel — there’s a ner­vous bar­tender called Thumboo.

The other thing that got me chuck­ling was Theroux’s impec­ca­bly (IMHO) accu­rate car­i­ca­tures of peo­ple he met while in Sin­ga­pore, and which appears in the novel — the small group of English-educated Sin­ga­pore­ans in the 70s, edu­cated in mis­sion schools, and when asked of their reli­gious lean­ings, reply, ‘we are Mef­fidists’; the office peon of Indian ori­gin who has a phys­i­cal impair­ment that makes him walk as though he were cycling an invis­i­ble bicy­cle; the inscrutable Chi­nese towkay who grunts in lieu of speaking.

Then there are the his­tor­i­cal arti­facts — and by them, I mean things which were com­monly used in the 1970s in Sin­ga­pore, but which have fallen by the way­side with the advent of tech­nol­ogy, and by the increas­ingly American-centric con­sumer cul­ture. Things like ‘sign­ing a chit’.

There’s a lot more to be said about the novel’s pro­tag­o­nist, Jack Flow­ers — about how he’s caught in a Sin­ga­pore that’s at a cross­roads, about how he embod­ies the unmis­tak­able sense of alien­ation and exile — but I’ll leave that to the peo­ple who write that best.

In 1978, a film based on the novel was shot in Sin­ga­pore. It was sub­se­quently banned from being screened here, osten­si­bly because of nudity. It was never a box-office hit any­where else, in any case. But as recently as 1997, it was allowed to be screened at the Sin­ga­pore Inter­na­tional Film Fes­ti­val under an R(A) rating.

Two days ago, the papers (Today) wrote that the ban on the film had been lifted, and was now avail­able under an M18 rat­ing. While there wouldn’t nor­mally be fan­fare sur­round­ing the film at all, there are a few rea­sons to want to buy the DVD and watch the film.

A few weeks ago, a Ben Slater emailed me, think­ing I’d be inter­ested in his new book about ‘Saint Jack’ (the film), called ‘Kinda Hot’, because he’d seen the tagline on my blog that has a quote from ‘Saint Jack’.

‘Kinda Hot’ is about the mak­ing of the film, and how the direc­tor, Peter Bog­danovich, had thought he’d duped the author­i­ties into let­ting him shoot the film here, and also talks about Sin­ga­pore­ans involved in the mak­ing of the film.

It’s prob­a­bly going to be a darn good read, and the book’s being launched tomor­row at Bor­ders. Slater him­self will be there at 2pm to give a talk, and he’s also indi­cated that some of the cast of the movie will be there as well.

Surf stop: High Browse Online

So, go ask now!

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