One more post about “Thirty-Three Teeth”

A few months ago, I invoked D.H. Lawrence’s poem “A Sane Revolution” when posting about Colin Cotterill's novel Anarchy and Old Dogs. The poem begins "If you make a revolution, make it for fun," and I thought it captured nicely the political attitudes of Cotterill and his protagonst, Dr. Siri Paiboun.

Now I'm reading Cotterill's Thirty-Three Teeth, and I thought of Lawrence's poem once more when I came to the following:

"Haeng ... let loose with one of his renowned maxims.

"`That's the spirit, Siri. It's moments like this that make the socialist system so great. When the call to arms comes the committed cadre, even on his honeymoon, would gladly climb off his young wife at the crucial moment sooner than let down the party.'

"If that were so, Siri thought to himself, it might explain the frustrated look he'd often seen on the faces of so many Party members."

If there's a better writer of gently humorous, satirically tinged, politically edged, occasionally spiritual, exotically set crime novels than Colin Cotterill, I can't think of who it might be.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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