My copy of A Single Pilgrim has at last found its spiritual home. Until a couple of months ago, I had forgotten about Norman Lewis. Then, correspondence with someone about life in Laos, introduced me to A Dragon Apparent, which I had never read. So intriguing was Lewis' descriptions of his travel during 1950 through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos that I searched out this novel, written apparently in the aftermath of that trip. That proved difficult. It is no longer in print, and I only found a copy from a used book merchant in the UK. It's a first edition whose original owner still has her bookplate affixed on the cover page. From 1953, a time two years before I was born, until today, and this novel has finally made it to the place that inspired it--Thailand. Between now and then, how the world has changed. And even more how Southeast Asia has changed. But not entirely.

I haven't had time to research A Single Pilgrim, but from the description contained therein, the novel seems to be set in Nan province, still a remote region of Thailand that first generated visits by American missionaries and then the filmmakers/explorers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack in the 1920s. Lewis' novel describes a time when that era is coming to a close and the postwar modernization of Thailand is beginning. Lewis clearly disapproved.

Crane and the Englishmen that populate this novel are of a kind that really don't do well in Thailand. Never have and never will. For all Lewis' sympathy for native cultures, the air of enlightened paternalism that John Crane carries around with him, broken and disillusioned though it may be, reflects on a certain sort of British disease--the desire to upbraid the "natives" for their moral shortcomings, while at the same time virtuously reveling in their own superior "understanding" of foreign lands, especially compared to the French and Americans. Lewis simply cannot escape from this attitude, and it drips from every page of the novel, which, otherwise, is an enjoyable and sometimes enlightening read.

There is not much written, apparently, about this novel. After all, Lewis was primarily a travel writer. And one of the best at that genre. But you can see an anticipation of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which appeared just two years after A Single Pilgrim. And the one thing it does better than most Western literature about Thailand and Laos is capture the lack of urgency regarding temporal matters. Much of that lack of urgency still lingers in the region today. But because of that, the book may be alien in its effect on Western, particularly British readers. ( )