John Sack is a veteran American journalist who has reported from, and written books on, very nearly everywhere. But here he has turned his hand to a novel, and the reason for this apparent change of tack is easy to understand. The Dragonhead is about the life of a prominent Chinese gang leader and his associates, and for Sack to publish his material in any other form would clearly involve unacceptable risks.
Even so, he insists in an afterword that he has changed very little from his sources, which include extensive interviews with the real-life equivalent of Johnny Kon, the novel's central figure, in an American jail.
But the fictional form isn't simply a maneuver of self-protection. Sack has seized the opportunity to produce something that gets under the skin of Asian life. He very obviously intends this compelling book to stand as his masterpiece.
It's a special kind of novel, too. It doesn't create a range of characters and then animate them in a variety of combinations. Instead, it looks at the world almost exclusively through the eyes of its protagonist, following his rise from poverty in China to immense power in the criminal underworld, almost in spite of himself.
This method results in the book reading as an understanding, even sympathetic, account. With the regular use of the present tense, and the plotline divided into very short sections, the story moves very fast.
Johnny is at first perplexed as the next step to infamy presents itself. That doing a menial sales job in a Hong Kong fur store should lead to trading animal skins in Vietnam is perhaps understandable. That this should then lead to selling drugs and managing prostitutes is far less so. In this novel, though, the link is made all but inevitable, at least when we are viewing the world from inside Johnny's head.
This is akin to the literary method called "stream of consciousness" when a character's thoughts are closely followed, however illogical they might be. But what is remarkable about this book is that there's little "literary" about it. The category the publishers allot it is "true crime," on a par with a Hollywood movie presenting the life of Al Capone or Butch Cassidy.
This book too is almost certain to be filmed. The scene where a gangster, carrying large amounts of heroin and about to be body-searched at the airport, drops his Minolta so that it smashes on the ground, provoking apologies all round while he walks away with the drugs, is pure cinema.
The book presents an entirely different view of the world from that of political analysts who balance, say, globalization against legitimate regional aspirations. Here everyone is corrupt -- the gangsters (naturally), but also the generals, the politicians, and even the ordinary high-street retailers. Kidnapping, extortion, mugging, enforced prostitution, offering and taking bribes, black-marketeering, dealing drugs, counterfeiting ID cards, filching government subsidies, dealing in smuggled goods -- these are the pillars that hold up Johnny's world. Its denizens wheel, deal, dine on Black Label and garlic shrimps, smoke themselves stupid, gamble, cheat, and lie even to themselves. It's a shocking vision of Asia, but in a sleazy bar in Pattaya or Wanchai you could persuade yourself it is indeed the whole truth. Go somewhere else and you won't be so sure.
Sack's knowledge of the region dates back five decades, and it's this background that makes the book so convincing. He knows, for instance, who the US personnel in high positions were in the days of the Vietnam War, and at the same time says he has hung out with Chinese criminals for a dozen years, only drawing the line at actually going on a robbery with them. The result is almost total credibility.
This, then, is the world of the Chinese secret societies made anything but secret. It's an alarming book, but at his age (we're told he's been a journalist for 55 years) John Sack is clearly going for gold. The pace and the verve never slacken. In places the book even reads like Hemingway, another writer with a reporter's background.
This book has all the hallmarks of a popular blockbuster. It does for the Chinese criminal world what Mario Puzo's The Godfather did for the Italian Mafia. Yet at the same time it's intelligent, knowledgeable, and not unsophisticated in its technique.
Taipei makes only brief appearances. Once Johnny stays a night in one of the city's five-star hotels, then flies out. On another visit he adds a Taiwanese passport to his already extensive collection. It's Hong Kong, not Taiwan, that's the center of his operations.
Sack ends the book with an all-embracing general statement. "We white men," he states, "are so entrenched in Congress, in state legislatures, and on city councils that we can and do pass laws declaring that our own favorite crimes aren't illegal." He deplores all Mafias, he insists, but still couldn't help hugging the real-life Johnny when he first saw him in jail. It's the equivalent of a hardened reporter's late-night insistence over bourbon that there's good and bad in everyone, and that everything depends on how you've been brought up to see the world.
The Dragonhead will almost certainly be very successful, and in some ways it deserves to be. The author clearly knows a lot about Asia, and about the ways of the Asian criminal underworld, and he allows the reader to share this knowledge by presenting it without undue partiality.
Novels on crime and criminals are often like this, from Henry Fielding's Jonathan Wilde to Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. You don't need to endorse what your gangsters do, but to bring them to life you must have an understanding of their way of looking at the world, and to do this you must to some extent sympathize with them. Hence Sack's hug in that American jail. It may seem outrageous to some, but this would have been a far less impressive book without it.
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