Smoking Poppy Graham Joyce
Victor Gollancz hardback, 233 pages, £12.99
Review by David Kendall (2001)
Smoking Poppy reads very differently to Joyce’s previous novel, Indigo. Less claustrophobic, the style is more immediate. There’s none of the heavy-handed ‛mystery’ and ominous shadow play. SP jumps straight in to its story of man-in-the-street, Danny Innes, caught up in traumatic circumstance: his daughter, Charlie, is imprisoned in Thailand for drug smuggling. It’s a nightmare straight from the headlines although in this novel the story isn’t broadcast around the world, and no journos are doorstepping Danny or his estranged wife for their reaction.
In tone SP reminded me most of Simon Armitage’s Little Green Man. It shares a similar protagonist who is marked out to the reader more by his thoughts than his actions. It takes his friend Mick to get Danny out to Thailand. Without Mick Danny might have stewed longer on why Charlie wasn’t asking him for help. When had she stopped asking him? Before she’d gone to University and become an alien being? It’s not just Charlie. Danny’s son Phil ‛contracted Christian fundamentalism’ while at or just after University. Danny blames his children’s experience of education for the distance they now are from him, geographically and mentally. But Danny’s wife has left him, and she didn’t go to university.
It’s not easy being inside Danny’s head. Despite being a voracious reader he’s a bit of a bore, and it is frustrating to inhabit his thoughts waiting for the penny to drop. Coupled with Mick, a fat, farting caricature of a slob, and his closed-in, religious son, it’s not an inspiring cast. In Thailand the screws are turned on them and when they finally find their princess things are not quite as they seem. This is familiar territory for Joyce: putting the pressure on a small isolated group and seeing what develops. At this point the book lengthens its stride and begins to romp along. The squabbling group are funny and touching in places, just as they’re supposed to be. Joyce is careful to balance Danny’s bitter sarcasm and interior landscape with Mick’s farting carousal, and Phil’s sullen tension.
The journey through the jungle searching for Charlie summons up images from a different generation of novels about the East. Joyce is at pains to show us that his is a more accurate version. His drugs warlord has a passion for the English education system and will protect his people whilst being a ruthless killer. But Joyce simply states there is a moral complexity rather than exploring it. This is true of other secondary characters such as Phil. We see one side of him as the screwed down fundamentalist, another side as the lost son, but little to knit the two sides together. Only Danny and Mick (reflected through Danny’s thoughts) get serious examination.
You don’t have to like Danny to enjoy this novel but you do have to believe in him. He doesn’t exactly know what he wants except it must have some sort of order. That is what has gone wrong in his life. He needs to get some structure to his life yet without his children and wife there will be no strength or shape to that structure. Smoking Poppy is driven by Danny’s ideas of what it is to be a father. It’s an attempt to plot out the strength of loyalty and love that makes up what it means to be a father even when your children don’t especially like you.
Where are the ghosts? Well, they’re there and to some extent they anchor the plot. The presence of an unseen world is delicately suggested as Joyce measures the effect on his characters by belief in ghosts as opposed to the actions of the ghosts themselves. The downside of the novel is it feels like a series of set pieces, isolated from each other and from the larger world we’re supposed to believe these characters inhabit. On his trip to rescue his daughter which is, really, a journey to find himself, Danny is brushed by ghosts. He gets a glimpse of another world and that supernatural revelation breaks down some of the rigidity in other parts of his life.
In the end I found I enjoyed the adventure novel elements to Smoking Poppy much more than the spiritual/emotional enlightenment of Danny, which was the reverse of what I had expected but no bad thing.