Comfort Zone

Vincent Calvino #4

by Christopher G. Moore

Twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam is opening to the outside world. There is a smell of fast money in the air and poverty in the streets. Business is booming and in austere Ho Chi Minh City a new generation of foreigners have arrived to make money and not war. Against the backdrop of Vietnam's economic miracle, Comfort Zone reveals a a divided people still not reconciled with their past and unsure of their future. Calvino is hired by an ex-special forces vet, whose younger brother uncovers corruption and fraud in the emerging business world in which his clients are dealing. But before Calvino even leaves Bangkok, there have already been two murders, one in Saigon and one in Bangkok.

Genres: Fiction

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Christopher G. Moore is a Canadian author who has lived in Thailand since 1988. Formerly a law professor at the University of British Columbia and a practicing lawyer, Moore has become a public figure in Southeast Asia, known for his novels and essays that have captured the spirit and social transformation of Southeast Asia over the past three decades.

Moore has written over 30 fiction and non-fiction books, including the Vincent Calvino novels which have won including the Shamus Award and German Critics Award and have been translated to over a dozen languages. Moore’s books and essays are a study of human nature, culture, power, justice, technological change and its implications on society and human rights.

Starting in 2017, the London-based Christopher G. Moore Foundation awards an annual literary prize to books advancing awareness on human rights. He’s also the founder of Changing Climate, Changing Lives Film Festival 2020.

Reviews

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 4 out of 5]

A paean to sordidness. That's what Christopher Moore accomplished with Comfort Zone. The Comfort Zone itself is the geographic confines of what amounts to Bangkok's Red Light district. Except it's Red Light Plus, encompassing bars, prostitutes, shady deals, and everything from gun running to drug dealing. But it's more than that to Moore. It's a metaphor for a state of mine, in which especially aging expatriates have had their psyches trapped, zapped, and drained of normal human interaction and responses. Not only the expats but the bar girls, bar owners, and everyone else who makes the place what it is also falls prey to this repetitive, abnormal existence.

In this novel, however, Vincent Calvino has decided to escape the Zone and look for normal relationships with people. It starts at the American Embassy's July 4th celebration, where Vincent has a sort of blind date with a friend's sister in law. It doesn't come off, and the friend convinces Vincent to take a case in Saigon. So off to Vietnam goes the story, where Vincent finally meets the girl of his dreams. Without giving anything away, it all ends predictably enough. Vincent ends up back in Bangkok, nursing his wounds, literal and psychological. And life goes on.

This marks yet another book devoted to Vincent's love life. His Japanese girlfriend worked herself out of his life in the first two books of the series. And in the volume published right before this, Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, he begins a dalliance with a white female French physician, which ends up going nowhere.

Moore produces consistently high quality work and never fails to lock in the reader. But there is always something, just that one thing, that keeps his books from going to the next step. And that is he lingers on obsessions and simply will not let them go. The obsession, here, is the Comfort Zone. By the end of the novel, it is overused, exhausted. I felt fatigued with it. Pity, because there is such an excellent story within and without it. Moore needs a touch of sparseness, I think, to achieve the right dose of melancholy. Overworked central metaphors prevent that.

[Bryan Thomas Schmidt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me put a caveat on this and say that my experience of this book was marred by the fact that the 2011 edition has horrible formatting errors. Dialogue from one character is combined with another in ways that makes it confusing who is speaking. And so that may have tempered my judgment in giving this a four-star. As books in the series go, it was not my favorite, but it certainly had a strong, emotional core. There were some interesting twist and turns, but I kind of felt the pacing was a bit off. I think they could’ve been a little bit more action and a little less time spent waiting in between, and it might’ve felt a little stronger to me. But the setting of Vietnam was a fascinating place to experience a Calvino story, and it was certainly presented as vividly as you would expect from Moore. Recommended.

[Jack Laschenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good Vincent Calvino story.

Saigon, 1970s. Murder, CIA revenge.

And Vincent's unsuccessful search for love in a crazy place.

Bodies all over the place.