In Myanmar a plaintive pop singer captivates Frater. "Her anguish had a kind of Wagnerian resonance," he writes. The song, he finds out, is Mummy, My Car Has Broken Down. Rain comes off the leaves of the palm tree, he observes, "in an interesting tonal way."
Frater takes his comedy where he can find it. As often as not, he turns up in the midst of lethal political conflicts or surveying the miseries of failed postcolonial states crippled by disease, poor education, bad roads and bleak economic prospects. Palm trees are not enough.
One of his more fascinating chapters describes, with a certain relish, several of the 40 tropical diseases that flourish in the torrid zone. He listens in fascination as a French doctor tells of transporting a woman to a hospital with an ax in her head.
More often than not, corrupt leaders preside over misery with serene indifference. Frater pays a visit to one of them, the King of Tonga, who speaks vaguely of earning billions by extracting natural gas from seawater. "He wore a gold Rolex on either wrist and, occasionally, would glance at both to indicate I was asking dumb questions in two time zones, or lapse into one of his famous transcendental silences," Frater writes. The audience is brief.
Frater has a wonderful plan for a tropical afterlife. He would like his ashes to be buried under a palm tree. "That would not only help nourish one of the world's most bountiful trees, but perhaps even allow me to wander eternally through the Torrid Zone," he writes.
Fleets of bobbing coconuts go on voyages lasting for years, riding the ocean currents for thousands of kilometers before washing up on dry land. Frater's best trip may lie ahead of him. He certainly deserves it.
RSS