Grossed out in Macau: Lawrence Osborne’s ‘The Ballad of a Small Player’
The novel where everyone involved is a revolting human being is one with a long pedigree but, perhaps because of that, is one that is often executed poorly. One of the natural pitfalls is that the characters’ terribleness is so awful as to detract from any sense of pathos we might receive. The most famous recent example of this failure is probably ‘Girls’ (2012–2017), in which the comic stylings invested so much time and effort into making their characters unpleasant that in the end all the audience could do is take a kind of schadenfreude pleasure in their downfalls. That is fine for a sketch but is hard to sustain over the length of a whole show.
(This, as an aside, is why most American sitcoms cannot artistically sustain themselves after around five or six seasons, by which point all the characters have been reduced down to their crudest stereotypes.)
Macau should be the perfect place for this kind of story. A little outcrop on the southeast coast of China, the city was acquired by the Portuguese in the 1550s and would be a major port for the growing East-West trade in a vast shipping line that linked Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro and the slave ports of West Africa with Goa, Malacca and then Macau itself. The city’s ‘Golden Age’ would, however, last less than a century as Portugal’s trading fortunes declined in the face of the Dutch Republic. In 1637 it was the Dutch who became the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan and four years later they conquered Malacca from the Portuguese. A few decades later, the liberalising Kangxi Emperor removed restrictions on trade with European merchants, ending the Portuguese’s privileged position. This was only further hammered home by the establishment of the permanent British presence in Hong Kong following the First Opium War.
In response to this drop in licit revenue flows, Macau, inevitably it seems, shifted to illicit ones. Firstly this came in the form of the dodgier ends of the opium trade (a relative term, of course) and in the transportation of coolies to Latin America. A position as a transit point for trans-Pacific trade, along with legal tolerance for gambling and less legal tolerance for piracy and smuggling, allowed Macau to achieve self-sufficiency by the 1930s. For those of you who are so inclined, it was basically Mos Eisley in real life.
Following the end of Portuguese rule, the old school casinos and fan-tan parlours have been upgraded and glossified. A large casino in Macau can now bring in more than the entire Las Vegas Strip in a year. But, unlike Las Vegas, Macau has not also turned its hand to the more wholesome fare that the American city also thrives on: not for Macau are the pop star residencies and circus acts. Instead, Macau concentrates on what it does best: gambling. It is for this reason that it has never shed that sleaziness. George Clooney and Brad Pitt don’t walk around Macau in their shirtsleeves.
The main character of Lawrence Osborne’s ‘The Ballad of a Small Player’, “Lord Doyle,” is the Danny Ocean that Macau deserves: a sweaty, middle-aged Englishman who ‘earned’ his fortune robbing demented old ladies of their life savings while working as a lawyer in a low-grade provincial firm. (It should go without saying that the ‘Lord’ part of his name is entirely fictitious.) Fleeing from the police, he has slipped into the nocturnal oblivion of the baccarat tables, watching his money slip away from him, alternating between panic and thoughtfulness at the prospect of bankruptcy and deportation.
As someone who is not a habitual gambler, I cannot speak to the verisimilitude of the lotus-eater call of the tables late at night, the insane highs and bottomless lows of winning or losing. But I do recognise the players, still and quiet, sitting at their tables, chain-smoking, drinking their comped champagne. I remember feeling how much more sensible I was than them — how I, in my wisdom, knew when to walk away or not to walk up at all. But, reading this, it’s hard to deny that there isn’t a certain appeal to the exuberance of the gambling addict, the absolute total certainty that your luck is about to turn, even as your chips are disappearing at a rate of knots. One of the great lies of my schoolboy drug education was that drugs don’t feel good when the exact opposite is true: weed is lovely, cocaine is awesome and heroin is fantastic. Baccarat — the favoured fame of our hero — is just like that, the irresistible dopamine hit of the nine giving way to the immediate desire to chase another. Throughout the narrative, Lord Doyle raises a cocked eyebrow at the superstitiousness of the Chinese, all the while giving in to it himself.
Narratively, this short book takes us around Lord Doyle’s life as he crashes, burns and then rises like a phoenix on the baccarat tables. It takes of a kind of drug-infused picaresque quality, as he slips through card games with the highest of rollers, the haziness of an encounter with a sex worker and a quasi-detox on Lamma Island. All the way through we are confronted with the kind of elegant, witty turns of phrase that can be a feature of the best Anglophone writing. As a minor example, early on Osborne describes the sound of a bottle of champagne leaving an ice bucket as a “rustle” and I’ve not been able to get that thought out of my head since then.
Imperceptibly, the novel winds into an unforgettable supernatural ending, as we are confronted with the idea that none of what we have read has been quite real. But, then again, we already knew that didn’t we? I was not surprised to learn that the film rights have already been optioned: it’s a cool idea. But I was even less surprised to learn that the film has been stuck at the development stage for nearly five years: it’s a tough narrative to get a handle on — all the characters are pathetic, hateful and elusive in equal measure and none of the sets feel entirely real.
As ever in great literature, everything is a metaphor for something else, an aphorism that is more true of gambling than many other things. But I am not sure what the metaphor is for in this novel. It seems churlish to chide an author for not being more explicable but sometimes one can’t help but wish the characters were less sphinx-like. It could easily be a dream, a kind of elaborate revenge fantasy concocted by a down-and-out fraudster rotting away in a jail in the south of England. Or maybe it’s all an abstracted argument about China’s return as a major power: as Lord Doyle learns “when you are on a roll you must roll and roll.” It’s a crude formulation, of course, but that doesn’t make it wrong, as Lord Doyle would tell you.
