Review
The Call of the Midnight Hour
1993
translated by Sukanya Cholasueks
Silkroad
Review by Peter Young in The Thai Literary Supplement #3 (December 2015).
Sabai Muang is one of the many pseudonyms of the prolific Thai author Sukanya Cholasueks, and The Call of the Midnight Hour is one of five novels she wrote on each of the Five Precepts of Buddhism. The Third Precept here is that of abstaining from sexual misconduct and is the story of Phatta, who abducts another man’s wife and suffers the consequences but also obtains a rather unusual redemption. Set in India at the time of the birth of Buddhism, Muang’s story has supernatural elements which muddy the waters of what is otherwise a very clear storyline, and towards the end it splits into two threads that separate what is going on with Phatta’s soul in the spiritual world and what is happening with his body in the real world, but these are mixed in such a way that I was often unable to tell what was happening where, and with whom. If the other four short novels are also published in English I’ll probably read them as well, as this was mostly well written even if I felt at times that it was either too straightforward in places, or a little too abstract.