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The Darkest Little Room
Patrick’s Holland’s haunting new novel arises from his experiences in Indochina. An atmospheric literary thriller, it tells the story of a foreign journalist living in Saigon who, shortly after reporting on a murdered girl washed up in Saigon River, is approached by a foreigner describing a brothel known as ‘the darkest little room in Saigon’. The mysterious man shows him a photograph of a beautiful woman covered in wounds and the journalist investigates, not only out of suspicion that women are being maltreated, but also in the hope of finding someone from his past.
Rich in setting and characterisation, and pure in voice, The Darkest Little Room explores the elemental dilemmas of being an outsider, the nature of desire, and the risks of loving, especially in a world where no one is who they seem.
Rich in setting and characterisation, and pure in voice, The Darkest Little Room explores the elemental dilemmas of being an outsider, the nature of desire, and the risks of loving, especially in a world where no one is who they seem.
264 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2012
3 people are currently reading
219 people want to read
About the author
Patrick Holland
21 books43 followersPatrick Holland grew up in outback Queensland, Australia. He worked as a stockman until taking up literary studies at Griffith University. He has studied Chinese and Vietnamese at universities in Beijing, Qingdao and Saigon.
His work attempts a strict minimalism inspired by Arvo Pärt and takes up geographical and theological themes, focussing on life’s simplest elements: light and dark; noise, sound and silence; wind and water.
His work attempts a strict minimalism inspired by Arvo Pärt and takes up geographical and theological themes, focussing on life’s simplest elements: light and dark; noise, sound and silence; wind and water.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
November 29, 2014
This is so beautiful I want to cry every time I pick it up.
I'm half way through, but here's just one example of what I'm talking about, when the heroine the hero and an unnamed man in a car meet on a bridge at night.
"But he knew she would return. At some depth of night, when the cold and hot flushes and the palpitations and nausea and the pain of living became too much she would return to him. I wondered if, like me, he imagined he cared enough not to give her too much of what she needed: only when he was made desperate by her absence, he allowed her to admit death into her body in the safety of his own room."
This book is not like anything I've ever read.
I'm half way through, but here's just one example of what I'm talking about, when the heroine the hero and an unnamed man in a car meet on a bridge at night.
"But he knew she would return. At some depth of night, when the cold and hot flushes and the palpitations and nausea and the pain of living became too much she would return to him. I wondered if, like me, he imagined he cared enough not to give her too much of what she needed: only when he was made desperate by her absence, he allowed her to admit death into her body in the safety of his own room."
This book is not like anything I've ever read.
January 19, 2016
because by the time I got to page 20, I knew I had to read it in one day or I would have a sleepless night. It is unputdownable.
I must be very careful not to reveal any spoilers, so I’ll say not much more than the blurb at Transit Lounge:
Patrick’s Holland’s haunting new novel arises from his experiences in Indochina. An atmospheric literary thriller, it tells the story of a foreign journalist living in Saigon who, shortly after reporting on a murdered girl washed up in Saigon River, is approached by a foreigner describing a brothel known as ‘the darkest little room in Saigon’. The mysterious man shows him a photograph of a beautiful woman covered in wounds and the journalist investigates, not only out of suspicion that women are being maltreated, but also in the hope of finding someone from his past.
The blurb also tells us that Matthew Condon (author of one of my favourite books, The Trout Opera) likens it to Graham Greene:
Thriller, love story, a journey of redemption … this is both a stunning page-turner and an investigation into the dim caverns of the human heart and soul that bears comparison to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. Holland’s writing is spare, gripping, and unexpectedly flares like the burning of Vietnamese paper money, as the book describes, for the ghosts of the unloved dead. Here is humour, menace and beauty effortlessly combined in a novel of genuine power. Holland is, quite simply, one of the best prose stylists working in Australia today.
I thought so too, and it’s not just because like The Quiet American Patrick Holland’s novel is set in a corrupt and menacing Vietnam. There is a similar preoccupation with The Innocent Abroad blundering into situations he doesn’t understand, and the writing is as compelling as anything Greene wrote. Like The Quiet American, The Darkest Little Room would make the most marvellous film. (Preferably starring Hugh Jackman).
To read the rest of my review (no spoilers) please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/12/12/th...
I must be very careful not to reveal any spoilers, so I’ll say not much more than the blurb at Transit Lounge:
Patrick’s Holland’s haunting new novel arises from his experiences in Indochina. An atmospheric literary thriller, it tells the story of a foreign journalist living in Saigon who, shortly after reporting on a murdered girl washed up in Saigon River, is approached by a foreigner describing a brothel known as ‘the darkest little room in Saigon’. The mysterious man shows him a photograph of a beautiful woman covered in wounds and the journalist investigates, not only out of suspicion that women are being maltreated, but also in the hope of finding someone from his past.
The blurb also tells us that Matthew Condon (author of one of my favourite books, The Trout Opera) likens it to Graham Greene:
Thriller, love story, a journey of redemption … this is both a stunning page-turner and an investigation into the dim caverns of the human heart and soul that bears comparison to Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. Holland’s writing is spare, gripping, and unexpectedly flares like the burning of Vietnamese paper money, as the book describes, for the ghosts of the unloved dead. Here is humour, menace and beauty effortlessly combined in a novel of genuine power. Holland is, quite simply, one of the best prose stylists working in Australia today.
I thought so too, and it’s not just because like The Quiet American Patrick Holland’s novel is set in a corrupt and menacing Vietnam. There is a similar preoccupation with The Innocent Abroad blundering into situations he doesn’t understand, and the writing is as compelling as anything Greene wrote. Like The Quiet American, The Darkest Little Room would make the most marvellous film. (Preferably starring Hugh Jackman).
To read the rest of my review (no spoilers) please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2012/12/12/th...
February 11, 2025
4 stelle più che abbondanti..
Un appassionante Noir diverso dal solito..
Ambientato tra Saigon e i confini tra Vietnam e Cina..
Un Noir denuncia, che nel raccontare la ricerca di Joe della sua ragazza dagli occhi verdi, getta luce sullo sfruttamento della prostituzione nel sud-est asiatico, della tratta di schiavi sessuali tra Cina, Vietnam, Laos, Thailandia, dei bambini venduti..
Temi forti, ma trattati con stile elegante e mai becero, con una bella prosa e delle bellissime descrizioni..
Nell'inferno in terra che alcune vivono, persino la morte è preferibile!!
Un appassionante Noir diverso dal solito..
Ambientato tra Saigon e i confini tra Vietnam e Cina..
Un Noir denuncia, che nel raccontare la ricerca di Joe della sua ragazza dagli occhi verdi, getta luce sullo sfruttamento della prostituzione nel sud-est asiatico, della tratta di schiavi sessuali tra Cina, Vietnam, Laos, Thailandia, dei bambini venduti..
Temi forti, ma trattati con stile elegante e mai becero, con una bella prosa e delle bellissime descrizioni..
Nell'inferno in terra che alcune vivono, persino la morte è preferibile!!
August 3, 2016
The Darkest Little Room is a ferocious book, full of the violence and beauty of Saigon.
Ostensibly it's a mystery involving a murdered girl. But the mystery plot is only the hanger Holland hangs his art upon. The girl-prostitute at the heart of the book is sparely and yet evocatively portrayed: at once entrancing, impenetrable and utterly untrustworthy, just like the Sino-Viet businessman, friend and confidant of the narrator, Zhuan.
It's the duplicities (and complicities) that are the great achievement of The Darkest Little Room. Rather than standing in judgement outside the events, and so delivering a moralistic tract, Holland delivers an experience, makes you feel voyeuristically complicit in the SE Asian sex trade, which by turns the narrator romanticizes, having it neon lit and glamorous, and every now and then sees the truth of. So he is capable of walking the streets of 'the awful and lovely prostitutes'.
Likewise, the novel enables us see through the narrator's testimony to the reality. For example, he claims to have deeply loved a teenage girl from the provinces he briefly met, and now spends his nights searching for her, but in fact, he never came back for her until it was far too late, and at the time made no proper declarations of love. What motivates him is guilt and a sense of necessary redemption that will take any object as its goal. At last, without giving too much away, reality cures him of illusion.
Indeed, this is a book about illusion, and the breaking of illusion. We are called to notice girls through Joseph and Zhuan's eyes, described as though they are happy ornaments, and at the next turn, to notice a barely hidden squalor, urine covered floors, money (emotion/sincerity, always traded for money - In Greene's The Quiet American, Fowler tells Pyle "Democracy is a very Western word", this novel suggests "love" is too), and violence behind the glitter. Zhuan dreams he is living in a different Saigon than the one out his window, so too Joseph looks for a girl who's face he admits he can't quite remember. Reading the novel I thought of Plato's cave and the ideal forms the poets long for but cannot reach, which 'fact' is oft presented as a tragedy, in The Darkest Little Room, Holland has it that the ideals are treacherous.
This is not a perfect novel. There are passages that seem weighed down with plot. That might sound like a strange criticism for a mystery novel, but at its best this book pulls you completely into its world, only now and then you get two characters talking who are plainly delineating plot points for the reader's benefit and I just wonder if these couldn't have been gotten rid off. Also, every now and then, despite Holland's evident minimalism, the occasional passage seems to get away from him, and becomes, dare I say it, wordy.
The high rhetoric can be just a little hit and miss, but wow when it hits! For example:
‘But the wounds … I do not know. They are curses, or miracles. Do
not ask again. Nhưng anh Nói thật không, anh sẽ dua em đi? …
But will you truly redeem me?’
‘Yes. If you are honest with me.’ Her eyes sparkled. I lowered
my own. ‘No. Even if you lie to me. No matter what you are.
You can lead me to the gates of Hell and I will stay beside you.’
And pages later, this mysterious echo:
‘She looked away to the north.
‘That is where you may have to go.’
‘Will you be with me?’
She raised her eyes and stared at me, with hope or sadness
I did not know. She looked back to the river.
‘Hell is vast. There are many people there.’
One more thing, on the next to last page, the dialogue is surely wrongly attributed. The girl's last articulation should surely have been attributed to Joseph, and hers to him. Is it a misprint?
But like all Holland's best writing, the book possesses a kind of hard, metallic beauty. (It is also apparently based on the classic Vietnamese poem, The Tale of Kieu, which I'll be getting a hold of). Perhaps, at last, the best, and only necessary recommendation is to say that Australian literature has no-one else like him. And we have nothing else like this.
Ostensibly it's a mystery involving a murdered girl. But the mystery plot is only the hanger Holland hangs his art upon. The girl-prostitute at the heart of the book is sparely and yet evocatively portrayed: at once entrancing, impenetrable and utterly untrustworthy, just like the Sino-Viet businessman, friend and confidant of the narrator, Zhuan.
It's the duplicities (and complicities) that are the great achievement of The Darkest Little Room. Rather than standing in judgement outside the events, and so delivering a moralistic tract, Holland delivers an experience, makes you feel voyeuristically complicit in the SE Asian sex trade, which by turns the narrator romanticizes, having it neon lit and glamorous, and every now and then sees the truth of. So he is capable of walking the streets of 'the awful and lovely prostitutes'.
Likewise, the novel enables us see through the narrator's testimony to the reality. For example, he claims to have deeply loved a teenage girl from the provinces he briefly met, and now spends his nights searching for her, but in fact, he never came back for her until it was far too late, and at the time made no proper declarations of love. What motivates him is guilt and a sense of necessary redemption that will take any object as its goal. At last, without giving too much away, reality cures him of illusion.
Indeed, this is a book about illusion, and the breaking of illusion. We are called to notice girls through Joseph and Zhuan's eyes, described as though they are happy ornaments, and at the next turn, to notice a barely hidden squalor, urine covered floors, money (emotion/sincerity, always traded for money - In Greene's The Quiet American, Fowler tells Pyle "Democracy is a very Western word", this novel suggests "love" is too), and violence behind the glitter. Zhuan dreams he is living in a different Saigon than the one out his window, so too Joseph looks for a girl who's face he admits he can't quite remember. Reading the novel I thought of Plato's cave and the ideal forms the poets long for but cannot reach, which 'fact' is oft presented as a tragedy, in The Darkest Little Room, Holland has it that the ideals are treacherous.
This is not a perfect novel. There are passages that seem weighed down with plot. That might sound like a strange criticism for a mystery novel, but at its best this book pulls you completely into its world, only now and then you get two characters talking who are plainly delineating plot points for the reader's benefit and I just wonder if these couldn't have been gotten rid off. Also, every now and then, despite Holland's evident minimalism, the occasional passage seems to get away from him, and becomes, dare I say it, wordy.
The high rhetoric can be just a little hit and miss, but wow when it hits! For example:
‘But the wounds … I do not know. They are curses, or miracles. Do
not ask again. Nhưng anh Nói thật không, anh sẽ dua em đi? …
But will you truly redeem me?’
‘Yes. If you are honest with me.’ Her eyes sparkled. I lowered
my own. ‘No. Even if you lie to me. No matter what you are.
You can lead me to the gates of Hell and I will stay beside you.’
And pages later, this mysterious echo:
‘She looked away to the north.
‘That is where you may have to go.’
‘Will you be with me?’
She raised her eyes and stared at me, with hope or sadness
I did not know. She looked back to the river.
‘Hell is vast. There are many people there.’
One more thing, on the next to last page, the dialogue is surely wrongly attributed. The girl's last articulation should surely have been attributed to Joseph, and hers to him. Is it a misprint?
But like all Holland's best writing, the book possesses a kind of hard, metallic beauty. (It is also apparently based on the classic Vietnamese poem, The Tale of Kieu, which I'll be getting a hold of). Perhaps, at last, the best, and only necessary recommendation is to say that Australian literature has no-one else like him. And we have nothing else like this.
January 20, 2019
This book came to me via a list of books that are about Vietnam but not about the Vietnam War, but it had little to say about Vietnamese culture, and I have little confidence in the accuracy of what it did say. The plot concerns the efforts of an Australian man in Saigon, a very Nice Guy, to find his One True Love, a very pretty girl he saw one time and hasn't been able to find since.
For some reason he decides the best way to find her will be to look in brothels? After two years, he runs across a girl whom he decides looks like her, and immediately declares that they belong together and that he intends to rescue her. Conflict ensues with the gang that owns her. She spends a couple of days with him, until she is kidnapped and taken from Saigon to the north of Vietnam by the gang. During their time together, the main character and his love interest hardly talk at all except to discuss whether or no she really needs rescuing in the first place (she is unconvinced at first, but he simply tells her over and over, and eventually she suddenly changes her mind. I did not find this process persuasive) but the book insists in portraying these sorts of stilted interactions as Love.
Along the way we learn such charming facts as "criminality is a way of life here", and many other statements to the effect that literally every person in Vietnam is a criminal of some sort and not to be trusted, that literally every restaurant in the country is not-so-secretly also a brothel, and many other things I find impossible to believe (and I find it nearly impossible to believe that the author, who like our main character is also a 30-something Australian who has lived in Saigon, believes these things). The book also, while the characters are on the border with China, makes several references to the weak reach of the laws of "the government in Saigon", even though it is set in the present day, in which that city is definitely not the capital of Vietnam.
In conclusion, don't feel I learned very much, and am baffled that this book was included in a list of books *about* Vietnam.
For some reason he decides the best way to find her will be to look in brothels? After two years, he runs across a girl whom he decides looks like her, and immediately declares that they belong together and that he intends to rescue her. Conflict ensues with the gang that owns her. She spends a couple of days with him, until she is kidnapped and taken from Saigon to the north of Vietnam by the gang. During their time together, the main character and his love interest hardly talk at all except to discuss whether or no she really needs rescuing in the first place (she is unconvinced at first, but he simply tells her over and over, and eventually she suddenly changes her mind. I did not find this process persuasive) but the book insists in portraying these sorts of stilted interactions as Love.
Along the way we learn such charming facts as "criminality is a way of life here", and many other statements to the effect that literally every person in Vietnam is a criminal of some sort and not to be trusted, that literally every restaurant in the country is not-so-secretly also a brothel, and many other things I find impossible to believe (and I find it nearly impossible to believe that the author, who like our main character is also a 30-something Australian who has lived in Saigon, believes these things). The book also, while the characters are on the border with China, makes several references to the weak reach of the laws of "the government in Saigon", even though it is set in the present day, in which that city is definitely not the capital of Vietnam.
In conclusion, don't feel I learned very much, and am baffled that this book was included in a list of books *about* Vietnam.
October 4, 2012
Saigon just roars off the pages of this book, entrancing, dangerous, violent and intoxicating. The savage streets, the bars, the wastelands, the darks and lights of the place all come together in a drama, about a journalist and a deceptive prostitute, that is worthy of Graham Greene.
Australia has an 'old lady' literary culture. God bless old ladies, I love em, I even hope to be one one of these days. But what else could explain the glut, the absolute glut of Woman's Day style 'romance in a foreign land' books and nostalgic, knitting and a cup of tea World War I&II books by authors whose most significant engagement with war was when they took out a library card and took the elevator to the appropriate section of the state library. So every single time we get something like this book - this raw, this real, this vital and urgent, about our time, our region, we should just put our hands together and thank the heavens for its very existence.
Australia has an 'old lady' literary culture. God bless old ladies, I love em, I even hope to be one one of these days. But what else could explain the glut, the absolute glut of Woman's Day style 'romance in a foreign land' books and nostalgic, knitting and a cup of tea World War I&II books by authors whose most significant engagement with war was when they took out a library card and took the elevator to the appropriate section of the state library. So every single time we get something like this book - this raw, this real, this vital and urgent, about our time, our region, we should just put our hands together and thank the heavens for its very existence.
August 30, 2016
A foreign journalist in Saigon becomes obsessed with a beautiful prostitute, her gentle seduction the web that captures his heart and poisons his sensibilities. Thrust into a seedy and uncompromising Vietnamese underworld THE DARKEST LITTLE ROOM takes the reader on a journey through dim-lit alleyways, cold nights, and pimps in search of profit while window dressing the heinous crime of sex trafficking young women.
The second half of THE DARKEST LITTLE ROOM is quality as the novel takes a turn away from the murder of a young, unknown woman to the ambiguous hunt for the object of the journalists' desire. Why does the protagonist fall so hard for this victim of circumstance? That's unclear, but when she goes missing, he does whatever he can, including acts of violence and assuming Mike Hammer-like bravado to find her.
Heartbreak flows through the stormy nights pooling in a puddle of despair mimicking the blood of the victims as author Patrick Holland brush strokes a noir with a truly satisfying payoff.
The second half of THE DARKEST LITTLE ROOM is quality as the novel takes a turn away from the murder of a young, unknown woman to the ambiguous hunt for the object of the journalists' desire. Why does the protagonist fall so hard for this victim of circumstance? That's unclear, but when she goes missing, he does whatever he can, including acts of violence and assuming Mike Hammer-like bravado to find her.
Heartbreak flows through the stormy nights pooling in a puddle of despair mimicking the blood of the victims as author Patrick Holland brush strokes a noir with a truly satisfying payoff.
October 11, 2012
A cynical journalist, seeking redemption, must rescue a prostitute, and the novel subtly asks the reader to remember Christ's rescue of Magdalene, but here's the twist: the girl, the lowly prostitute, with the miraculous marks on her body, who effectively comes back from the dead, is the redeemer. To quote/adjust Isaiah "By her wounds he his healed".
You don't do a three week tour of Indochina and come back with a book like this, perhaps the best novel written in English on Indochina since the war novels, and I can only guess the author has a deep connection with Vietnam.
This novel is very special.
You don't do a three week tour of Indochina and come back with a book like this, perhaps the best novel written in English on Indochina since the war novels, and I can only guess the author has a deep connection with Vietnam.
This novel is very special.
April 10, 2013
Interesting, convoluted. A bit abrupt at the end.
A story of a Vietnamese speaking Australian who seeks to find his lost love in Saigon. It becomes a story of deceit and intrigue.
There was a depth during the telling of the story that I enjoyed but the ending seemed to lack that depth and become a kind of attempt to tie everything up. I enjoyed the layers as the story unravelled.
It's also a look at one of the dark sides of Vietnam.
A story of a Vietnamese speaking Australian who seeks to find his lost love in Saigon. It becomes a story of deceit and intrigue.
There was a depth during the telling of the story that I enjoyed but the ending seemed to lack that depth and become a kind of attempt to tie everything up. I enjoyed the layers as the story unravelled.
It's also a look at one of the dark sides of Vietnam.
November 13, 2012
So beautiful. So strange.
February 3, 2025
The Darkest Little Room by Patrick Holland is an engaging and intriguing novel set in Vietnam. The short, manageable chapters make it an easy book to pick up and read in bursts, and the storyline itself is compelling. The writing however could have been smoother—some paragraphs felt disjointed, and there were a few gaps in the story. The novel’s setting is one of its strongest points. By incorporating real locations in Vietnam, the book brings the city to life, making it easy to visualize and even reminisce about Saigon and Vietnam as a whole. Despite its flaws, the book does a great job of immersing the reader and should be commended for a foreign author writing a compelling novel set in Vietnam.
April 16, 2022
Sex slaves in Indochina, probably not the nicest place to start. But the whole Vetinam recent history is not nice at all. These people suffered for years with many war crimes committed. It is a story that needs to be told. The powerful human ability to do anything to survive, sell a daughter, sell your wife, sell yourself, all justified if you get to live just one more day.
I didn't like the style of writing, but that's just me. The story was powerful and frightening.
I didn't like the style of writing, but that's just me. The story was powerful and frightening.
March 10, 2022
Una via di mezzo tra mystery e noir dalle atmosfere cupe e rarefatte.
Potrebbe anche essere un sogno drogato di un ubriaco.
Un libro confuso e ossessivo, si potrebbe riassumere come la "storia di una ossessione" ambientata nei bassifondi di una Saigon malfamata e viziosa.
Potrebbe anche essere un sogno drogato di un ubriaco.
Un libro confuso e ossessivo, si potrebbe riassumere come la "storia di una ossessione" ambientata nei bassifondi di una Saigon malfamata e viziosa.
September 7, 2018
A chilling book about sexual slavery in Vietnam.
Very hard to put the book down.
Quite horrifying really.
Very hard to put the book down.
Quite horrifying really.
January 25, 2019
Amazing book. This is how I think of Vietnam, beautiful and dangerous and always a mystery.
February 13, 2015
Though this novel deserves more than three stars, four would gloss over its flaws. That its characters don’t develop feels realistic. But the narrative voice is an issue. I found it anachronistic, romantic, an exercise in nostalgia. And feminists, be warned: the treatment of females by the author, not just the male characters, may induce anger. Or boredom.
This is the second thriller I’ve read since Christmas that’s narrated by a jaded, morally challenged adult male who seeks redemption through saving a beautiful teen whore. But the author of Galveston, Nic Pizzolatto, has mastered the art of realist prose. Perhaps he also had a crack editor. Holland’s novel is at least one draft away from greatness – common with Oz fiction, especially from ‘emerging’ authors. Near enough is good enough. In the past, authors at Holland’s stage would have received more support. They still do, with certain publishers (I think Text is one). Overall, though, standards are falling. They don’t make editors like they used to. Yet without highly skilled editors, most authors will never fulfil their potential.
And whatever happened to proofreading? The Darkest Little Room is studded with typos. The publisher’s done a nice job with design but there must be more to a book than its cover. We now live in a culture where self-published authors who can afford a competent editor’s services are producing more polished, professional-looking work than some small presses manage to. Holland deserves more attention than he’s getting. It’s not enough just to put the books out there – good editing ensures that they’re ready. I can’t recall seeing one typo in Galveston. But its point of view doesn’t falter either; no author’s notes to self intrude. Holland, in contrast, seems compelled to spell out his themes. To me, it feels as if he’s underestimating the reader – are Oz readers a more passive breed?
It took me quite a few chapters to surrender to Holland’s narrator, Joseph. The last novel I’d read was The Quiet American by Graham Greene. And I found the profusion of borrowed elements in Holland’s distracting. Like Greene’s thriller, The Darkest Little Room is partly set in Saigon. Joseph is a journalist, a worldly white male, in love with a much younger Asian female. Opiate abuse is a recurring motif, against the larger theme of a love triangle. And a key female character in both novels bears the name ‘Phuong’ (meaning: ‘phoenix’). While such similarities can be seen as homage, they hardly scream originality. And some of the differences disappoint. Greene’s writing is taut, spare, compressed; his journalist narrator convinces. But Holland’s sounds more like an aspiring poet – too wordy by half for a journalist. Characters never frown; they furrow their brows. Sentences run on and on by means of repetition of ‘and’, a stylistic tic that soon grows monotonous.
The back-cover blurb compares Holland to Greene (well, duh!) and Conrad (and, sure, the book charts a journey into darkness). And it’s true that these greats are evoked in The Darkest Little Room. If you have to be derivative, why not go back to the source? Too many writers these days merely imitate the imitators. Holland demonstrates more discernment.
And the story gets better as it goes along. Holland writes more poignantly of the memory of the love object (and she’s nothing if not objectified) than of her interactions with Joseph. The dialogue sometimes feels strained with so much rendered in both Vietnamese and English. Though the translation adds texture and atmosphere, it also functions as a distraction.
The narrative really hits its stride in the novel’s second half when Joseph sets out on a desperate search through Vietnam’s wild and dangerous north. Here, more than in the fictionally well-trodden streets and alleys of Saigon, Holland’s descriptive powers shine. But while he waxes lyrical over settings, the action can lack detail, so that deaths feel like mere plot points: insubstantial, unreal. It’s as if Holland has gotten lost in the purely symbolic – not unlike his narrator, who seems to have true love confused with youth and beauty. How else could he have become obsessed with a 15-year-old girl whom he knew so briefly that when he thinks he’s met her again, he can’t be certain it’s her. And the unoriginal plot twist occurring near the end only highlights Joseph’s failure to see beyond surfaces. I wept at the end of The Quiet American. But The Darkest Little Room’s stress on theme didn’t leave me enough space to feel.
This is the second thriller I’ve read since Christmas that’s narrated by a jaded, morally challenged adult male who seeks redemption through saving a beautiful teen whore. But the author of Galveston, Nic Pizzolatto, has mastered the art of realist prose. Perhaps he also had a crack editor. Holland’s novel is at least one draft away from greatness – common with Oz fiction, especially from ‘emerging’ authors. Near enough is good enough. In the past, authors at Holland’s stage would have received more support. They still do, with certain publishers (I think Text is one). Overall, though, standards are falling. They don’t make editors like they used to. Yet without highly skilled editors, most authors will never fulfil their potential.
And whatever happened to proofreading? The Darkest Little Room is studded with typos. The publisher’s done a nice job with design but there must be more to a book than its cover. We now live in a culture where self-published authors who can afford a competent editor’s services are producing more polished, professional-looking work than some small presses manage to. Holland deserves more attention than he’s getting. It’s not enough just to put the books out there – good editing ensures that they’re ready. I can’t recall seeing one typo in Galveston. But its point of view doesn’t falter either; no author’s notes to self intrude. Holland, in contrast, seems compelled to spell out his themes. To me, it feels as if he’s underestimating the reader – are Oz readers a more passive breed?
It took me quite a few chapters to surrender to Holland’s narrator, Joseph. The last novel I’d read was The Quiet American by Graham Greene. And I found the profusion of borrowed elements in Holland’s distracting. Like Greene’s thriller, The Darkest Little Room is partly set in Saigon. Joseph is a journalist, a worldly white male, in love with a much younger Asian female. Opiate abuse is a recurring motif, against the larger theme of a love triangle. And a key female character in both novels bears the name ‘Phuong’ (meaning: ‘phoenix’). While such similarities can be seen as homage, they hardly scream originality. And some of the differences disappoint. Greene’s writing is taut, spare, compressed; his journalist narrator convinces. But Holland’s sounds more like an aspiring poet – too wordy by half for a journalist. Characters never frown; they furrow their brows. Sentences run on and on by means of repetition of ‘and’, a stylistic tic that soon grows monotonous.
The back-cover blurb compares Holland to Greene (well, duh!) and Conrad (and, sure, the book charts a journey into darkness). And it’s true that these greats are evoked in The Darkest Little Room. If you have to be derivative, why not go back to the source? Too many writers these days merely imitate the imitators. Holland demonstrates more discernment.
And the story gets better as it goes along. Holland writes more poignantly of the memory of the love object (and she’s nothing if not objectified) than of her interactions with Joseph. The dialogue sometimes feels strained with so much rendered in both Vietnamese and English. Though the translation adds texture and atmosphere, it also functions as a distraction.
The narrative really hits its stride in the novel’s second half when Joseph sets out on a desperate search through Vietnam’s wild and dangerous north. Here, more than in the fictionally well-trodden streets and alleys of Saigon, Holland’s descriptive powers shine. But while he waxes lyrical over settings, the action can lack detail, so that deaths feel like mere plot points: insubstantial, unreal. It’s as if Holland has gotten lost in the purely symbolic – not unlike his narrator, who seems to have true love confused with youth and beauty. How else could he have become obsessed with a 15-year-old girl whom he knew so briefly that when he thinks he’s met her again, he can’t be certain it’s her. And the unoriginal plot twist occurring near the end only highlights Joseph’s failure to see beyond surfaces. I wept at the end of The Quiet American. But The Darkest Little Room’s stress on theme didn’t leave me enough space to feel.
May 19, 2016
I read this book as part of the Aussie Authors Challenge 2016. This is the first novel of Patrick Holland's I have read.
This is the story of an Australian journalist Joseph living in Saigon who, shortly after reporting on a murdered girl washed up in Saigon River, is approached by a foreigner describing a brothel known as ‘the darkest little room in Saigon’. The mysterious man shows him a photograph of a beautiful woman covered in wounds and Joseph investigates, not only out of suspicion that women are being maltreated, but also in the hope of finding someone from his past.
Holland’s style of writing has been described as ‘spare’ and this is indeed so. In fact, it is so spare that in the first few chapters I was having a hard time feeling any empathy for Joseph. However as the story progressed, he started to grow on me, especially as the story itself, revolving around the girl trafficking trade in Vietnam, is interesting and absorbing. It has a few twists and turns and one at the end I definitely didn’t see coming. There are also a lot of moral questions touched on in the story, such as the role of outsiders in a centuries old culture, the morality of allowing the trafficking of girls which is part of that culture, the nature of guilt and atonement and the all-encompassing quality of love.
All throughout the book I was trying to work out why Joseph, a jaded, somewhat cynical journalist had fallen in love with a beautiful Vietnamese prostitute, also a heroin addict, from a destitute background. What was the attraction? Then at the end, one of characters says,’ you know, there is a certain kind of man that can only love what is wounded, broken. A man filled with guilt.’
And then I got it.
This is the story of an Australian journalist Joseph living in Saigon who, shortly after reporting on a murdered girl washed up in Saigon River, is approached by a foreigner describing a brothel known as ‘the darkest little room in Saigon’. The mysterious man shows him a photograph of a beautiful woman covered in wounds and Joseph investigates, not only out of suspicion that women are being maltreated, but also in the hope of finding someone from his past.
Holland’s style of writing has been described as ‘spare’ and this is indeed so. In fact, it is so spare that in the first few chapters I was having a hard time feeling any empathy for Joseph. However as the story progressed, he started to grow on me, especially as the story itself, revolving around the girl trafficking trade in Vietnam, is interesting and absorbing. It has a few twists and turns and one at the end I definitely didn’t see coming. There are also a lot of moral questions touched on in the story, such as the role of outsiders in a centuries old culture, the morality of allowing the trafficking of girls which is part of that culture, the nature of guilt and atonement and the all-encompassing quality of love.
All throughout the book I was trying to work out why Joseph, a jaded, somewhat cynical journalist had fallen in love with a beautiful Vietnamese prostitute, also a heroin addict, from a destitute background. What was the attraction? Then at the end, one of characters says,’ you know, there is a certain kind of man that can only love what is wounded, broken. A man filled with guilt.’
And then I got it.
April 30, 2016
It might be me, but this novel did not resonate with me like I thought it would and I'm not sure exactly why.
It is a story of a journalist searching for a mystery woman that he has fallen in love with or has become enchanted with, while navigating the dangerous world of decadent Vietnam and those that exist within the underworld of drugs and prostitution.
In the book, most of the characters may or may not be what they profess to be and while the main character navigates this world, in one way, he appears to be a one-dimensional character that seems to never learn when it comes to the dangers of walking within an underground society of those that offer depravities that one seeks.
Sort of like the older depiction of the noir detective that keeps getting hit on the head each time he walks into a room or by a dark alley and never seems to change his behavior.
In the end, it got to the point where I just wanted to finish the book to see how it ended and move on to the next book on my reading list.
It is a story of a journalist searching for a mystery woman that he has fallen in love with or has become enchanted with, while navigating the dangerous world of decadent Vietnam and those that exist within the underworld of drugs and prostitution.
In the book, most of the characters may or may not be what they profess to be and while the main character navigates this world, in one way, he appears to be a one-dimensional character that seems to never learn when it comes to the dangers of walking within an underground society of those that offer depravities that one seeks.
Sort of like the older depiction of the noir detective that keeps getting hit on the head each time he walks into a room or by a dark alley and never seems to change his behavior.
In the end, it got to the point where I just wanted to finish the book to see how it ended and move on to the next book on my reading list.
March 11, 2014
The Darkest Little Room is a thriller written in clean, luminous prose. There's so much in this book: starting with the the evocation of "the radiant locales of inner Saigon" a place "awful and strange" which the main character,a foreign journalist called Joseph, never wants to leave. Then there's the investigation of a murder, and the surprising places this leads Joseph, set against the sad and sordid backdrop of human trafficking. There's love and estrangement in Joseph's yearning for Thuy, who may or may not be dead. And there's the 'darkest little room'itself -- both a physical location for the enactment of the unspeakable, and a metaphor for the darkest little room in each one of us
April 6, 2016
Tough and deeply depressing, this book captures the smell and sound and feel of Saigon/Vietnam brilliantly. A journalist trying to rectify a mistake. Children sold for sex. A country reeking of corruption. An impressive book.
May 13, 2013
The story is good and well enough, but the language and character voice are flat as a pancake.
March 3, 2014
I like that it took me somewhere I had never been. Beautiful darkness.
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