Books & Poetry

In Geoff Ryman’s novels, everyone is important. ‘The King’s Last Song’ tells us about Jayavarman, the Khmer king who gave up the pursuit of sainthood to unify his country, but also about William and Map, two guides to the wreckage of modern Cambodia. It is a novel about forgiveness and finding a point to your life to which Map’s quest to atone for what he did in the Pol Pot years is as central as the search of Jayavarman’s crippled son to find a role in a world in which he is regarded as cursed by the gods.

And finding a role, finding salvation, is always to some degree in the hands of chance. Luc, the French archaeologist in charge of the recently rediscovered memoirs of Jayavarman, finds his fulfilment translating them as a way to stay alive in the hands of Khmer Rouge holdouts. His captor Pich comes, without ever softening, to respect Luc’s very different dedication. Map, by contrast, has done, almost by accident, things that neither he nor those around him can forgive; it was his fate to live in terrible times.

Ryman must do in this novel things to which his extraordinary technique has never previously needed to stretch – and he proves equal to the challenge of medieval battle scenes as he has been, in previous books, to phantasmagoric magic, the London Underground, interstellar travel and sex with Picasso. As always, though, he is at his best with friendship, and with love, and that odd area they share; he has always had a talent for making us see, not least into the human heart. In some of this novel’s best scenes, Jayavarman’s intellectual mystic wife and the slave concubine he knew as a child (and who helped him when he was a prisoner) find ways of living alongside each other, of being gracious in sharing.

‘The King’s Last Song’ is a marvellous book about the making of souls which turns out to have more than we might suppose to do with the writing and rewriting of books; both are acts of nervy creativity.