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    Hunters in the Dark
    Hunters in the Dark
    Hunters in the Dark
    Audiobook9 hours

    Hunters in the Dark

    Written by Lawrence Osborne

    Narrated by Stephen Hogan

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the novelist the New York Times compares to Paul Bowles, Evelyn Waugh and Ian McEwan, an evocative new work of literary suspense Adrift in Cambodia, Robert Grieve - pushing thirty and eager to side-step a life of quiet desperation as a small-town teacher - decides to go AWOL. As he crosses the border from Thailand, he tests the threshold of a new future. And on that first night, a small windfall precipitates a chain of events involving a bag of "jinxed" money, a suave American, a trunk full of heroin, a hustler taxi driver, a corrupt policeman, and a rich doctor's daughter, in which Robert's life is changed forever. Hunters in the Dark is a sophisticated game of cat and mouse, where identities are blurred, greed trumps kindness, and karma is ruthless. Filled with Hitchcockian twists and turns, suffused with the steamy heat and pervasive superstition of the Cambodian jungle, and unafraid to confront uneasy questions about luck and the machinations of fate, this is a masterful novel that has the feel of an instant classic.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 12, 2016
    ISBN9781501904646
    Hunters in the Dark
    Author

    Lawrence Osborne

    Lawrence Osborne has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and other publications, and is the author of books including The Naked Tourist. Born in England, he lives in New York.

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    Reviews for Hunters in the Dark

    3.5/5

    122 ratings37 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is quite an engrossing tale which takes place in the exotic world of Cambodia. A young English teacher, bored with his complacent life, decides to disappear. During his first night in Cambodia, he tries his hand at a gambling casino. What happens there sets off a series of events in which greed, karma and superstition play a huge part.This author has crafted a gripping, suspenseful plot. I’ve recently been very disappointed in how inept publishers’ blurbs have become. Far too often, their comparisons of one author to another is completely unfathomable. When I saw this book compared to works of Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock, I feared that I would again be disappointed. But I do think the comparison to Highsmith and Hitchcock are right on target, although I’m not sure I see the connection to du Maurier. This author knows how to structure a very neat plot and how to create a haunting, chilling atmosphere. I cared for this naïve young Englishman and wanted to shake him many times as he innocently walks from one danger into the next. I noticed that some reviewers are saying that the book starts out too slowly, but I think the author did a great job of slowly building up the tempo of the work. If it does start out slowly for you, stick with it and I think you’ll appreciate as the story progresses just how fine a plot this author has produced. I’ll be looking into more work by Mr. Osborne.Very entertaining literary thriller.This book was given to me by the publisher through Blogging for Books.
    • 5/5
      This has all of the atmosphere and style of an old (good) movie from the 1950s or '60s, packed as it is with lush and playful conversations, mysterious characters, and gorgeous settings. From page to page, it builds layers and complexity, and showcases the sort of noir-Hitchcock feel it embraces with a wink a every corner. All told, it's a haunting and compulsive read, spiraling on itself in a way that makes for a wonderfully fun read that's gorgeously written and beautifully imagined.Absolutely, I'd recommend this, and without a doubt I'll be looking up more of Osborne's work sooner than later.
    • 3/5
      The book follows a British teacher losing himself in Cambodia, and at first I thought it might just be a more mundane version of Heart of Darkness. I also thought Cambodia might just end up as the strange, exotic place for the white guy to get lost. Eventually, though, the point of view opened up and we got to know several other characters and some twistier, more noirish plot surfaced. The book ended up saying something about Cambodia itself and not just the man who was visiting. I don't know much about the country, so I can't vouch for its accuracy, but Osborne successfully described it as both an sultry, impenetrable example of foreignness and then later tried to make some real comments about the lingering effects of the horrors that Pol Pot brought onto the nation. It kept my attention and kept me wanting to keep going. I would have wanted to finish it even if I hadn't been an early reviewer, but there were still some problems. It occasionally fell victim to that tendency for characters to do something or go somewhere for no reason but that they felt drawn to it, which, absent some mystical force drawing them, just feels like sloppy, arbitrary plotting, and the reason they went was because the author wanted them to.
    • 5/5
      Hunters in the Dark is my first Lawrence Osborne novel, though I’d often heard him compared to Graham Greene and Paul Bowles. Reading a little into Osborne’s background, I was struck by how rare it is to see a writer like him these days, one who lives as nomad moving from one locale to another, for whom traveling and writing are synonymous. Hunters in the Dark is a template of this. In the novel, the main character, twenty-something-year-old Robert Grieve, finds himself in Cambodia, running afoul and adrift in world that is both alluring and alien to him. This alone might be enough to turn off a lot of readers, myself included, but Osborne deftly avoids falling into the common pitfall of white-man-in-awe-of-exotic-East. There is a hint of that wide-eyed awe only because our main character is such fish out of water, but Osborne quickly turns that tired trope on its head in startling new ways. Hunters in the Dark evokes the kind of tension and contrasts we see in Henry James’s Daisy Miller: the old world butting heads with a new world and modernity; how innocence and wonder is strafed by cynicism and nihilism. Here it is the Western world that is in decline: “They were middle-class and unemployed, or so it seemed, their education now of little value, and they seemed to be able to scrounge enough money to take leave of their senses for months on end. Once upon a time, the Khmers had been in awe of them. But now, their dirtiness and scruffiness and unruliness had dimmed their image at the very moment that the Chinese and Thais had come into considerable amounts of money. The barangs no longer seemed as formidable as their grandparents, even if their grandparents had been hippies in the sixties.”Disillusioned with his life as a teacher back in England, Robert takes off to Southeast Asia, first spending time in Thailand, then crossing the border into Cambodia. He becomes swept up in the notion of starting a new life, of shedding his life of predetermined days, a ‘life measured out in coffee spoons’ so to speak. Robert is our naive, ingenuous Daisy Miller, who loses himself in a country of deep ancient history, but also a country that is just coming to terms with the trauma of the Pol Pot regime. It is a visit to a casino where he spends the last of his savings and wins the princely sum of $2000 that changes everything. The money sets into motion a complex series of events, not unlike the beating wings of a butterfly setting off a hurricane.Robert hires Ouksa, a Cambodian driver, who takes him around to various sights. He plays tourist long enough to meet Simon Beaucamp, a charismatic, smooth-talking American who takes Robert to visit his luxurious house overlooking the river, despite the protestations from Ouksa who senses something awry about Simon. Robert later makes it to Phnom Penh. This time without any of his belongings. Without his passport and no money, he wonders around in a stupor until he finds luck again when he is hired as an English tutor to the daughter of a wealthy Khmer family. In this role, he decides fate has given him an opportunity to reinvent himself. He takes the name of his American acquaintance, Simon.What is remarkable about Hunters is how subtle the menace is throughout and how it colors and infuses the smallest gestures and actions. Osborne’s writing is precise, the details sharp and specific. When he describes something, you experience it exactly; the scene appears in your mind in sharp relief. And yet his writing also casts shadows, and double-edged meanings and symbols abound: “When Ouksa had driven off, the two white men sat on the veranda with gin and tonics. The open rafters of the house seemed immense in the night shadows, the moths spinning around the wooden beams. It looked like a house which Simon had built himself since it was so much better looking than the houses he had seen up till then. Simon put on some music from the house above them. He took out his ornate Moroccan chessboard, with its pieces carved from argun wood and hand-painted, and they set it up on the coffee table between them. He said he had bought long ago in Essaouria on the Atlantic coast and it had a spirit that helped his game. He laid out the piece and they flipped for black and white and Robert got black. He kicked off his sandals and the alcohol swelled within him and he absorbed the humid smell of datura coming in from the forest. The roneat music was faintly chiming out in the pitch-black fields, a wailing of fiddles as well. Simon made the first move and soon he was winning easily. He was the kind of player who had all his moves prepared in his head long before he touched a single pawn.”Osborne’s writing is precise, but the tone is ambiguous and mysterious, portending something sinister or profound in ways that I found delightfully unsettling. Hunters feels like an old school psychological thriller that would have felt right at home in the hands of Alfred Hitchcock. But it’s a thriller that pushes the boundaries of the genre with its obsession with the ideas of fate and chance. Fate and chance here are not just abstract themes but the very fulcrums that turn the plot.In the end, the whirlwind of experiences changes Robert. His Western confidence in certainties is forever tainted: “Karma swirled around all things, lending them destinies over which mere desire had no control. It made one’s little calculations irrelevant.” Ultimately, I think Osborne is giving us a critique of Western life and its modern ideas of individualism and linear thinking at the level of plot and narrative structure. But it isn’t just a simple contrast of East versus West. It is also a contrast of modes of thinking: rational European versus a Khmer one that puts equal weight on omens, signs, and spirits. It is a book about different belief systems colliding and crashing into each other with violent consequences.
    • 4/5
      Six-word review: Naivete and randomness in mysterious Cambodia.Extended review:Hunters in the Dark is the story of Robert Grieve, a young Englishman on holiday in the Far East in the present decade. By a stroke of luck at the gaming tables, Robert parlays his few weeks in Bangkok into an open-ended sojourn in Cambodia. His ties to his parents, his girlfriend, and his job back home prove to be much weaker than he thought. In fact, he doesn't have a sense that he has much to lose if he lets them go; his life has been pretty empty so far:"The sweet bird of youth, in his case, had nowhere to perch and had not taken flight to begin with. His youth was a wingless dodo. One could go on and on and that bird would still not sing." (page 32) And now things seem to be happening to him, and he embraces them as they occur. Instead of returning home as planned, he follows an impulse to wander and explore, trusting that somehow his resources will suffice, supplemented as they may be by the kindness of strangers.A fateful encounter with a seemingly affluent American who offers him hospitality turns the wheel of destiny for Robert. On his own in a country of alien sensibilities, where ghosts and omens seem genuine, where a dark cloud of genocidal history hangs over the people, Robert fails to anticipate what a mark his naivete represents to people who have learned through pain and privation things that he has never had to know.This is a song of innocence and experience, with touches of the sublime. Lush description furnishes atmosphere so thick that it seems to fill the senses, often with a shadow of menace:"Near the reeds the water rustled against debris and the edge of moon lit the smooth, unctuous surface as it constantly shifted. All along its length the frogs sang at full throttle, a sinuous chorus that seemed to possess a relaxed relentlessness, and it served to calm slightly jangled nerves, the apprehension that for Robert always came with night." (page 45)The narrative moves slowly, like a wide, shallow river thick with reeds. Somehow the unpredictable and the inevitable coexist, not only intertwined but sometimes indistinguishable. For Robert, the course of events leads through deception, robbery, stolen identity, and abduction, alongside adventure and romance--not of the swashbuckling kind; more of the it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time kind. Under the brooding clouds, heavy with tropical rain and jungle heat, Robert makes life-altering choices in a clueless way that reminds us how clueless we all are about the actual consequences of our actions. The uncertain, the unknown, and the unforeseen are more real than anything we expect.I won't explain the title because the author explains it at the point in the text where he deems it relevant; but I will say that it is a figure of speech and not literally about hunting. I was anticipating a different sort of book from the title and from some very misleading back-cover text: "a chain of events--involving a bag of 'jinxed' money, a suave American, a trunk full of heroin..." and "a sophisticated game of cat and mouse...." This led me to think I was heading into an action novel with B-movie effects featuring some sort of adversarial interaction between a Bond-like protagonist and the agents of some criminal enterprise. In fact there's no sophisticated game, no criminal organization, and, so far as I can tell, no trunk full of heroin. I suspect that the back-cover copy writer didn't read the whole book.The author may not be (is not, I hope) responsible for the jacket copy, but there were some irritating lapses that led me to my favorite refrain: where was the editor? For instance, he refers more than once to Vishnu the destroyer. In the Hindu trinity, Vishnu is the preserver and Shiva is the destroyer. Osborne says that Pol Pot, the leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge, was a good student in Paris, but the many sources I have read over the years describe him as an indifferent or poor student who had to leave his school for failing grades and who wrote C papers on politics and economy. The author also refers twice to someone's recuperating something he's lost or left behind, but the word is recoup. It's not short for "recuperate," which means to recover in the sense of healing, not regaining possession.For the story, the characters, and the exotic setting, I would normally rate this novel at 3½ stars, which is a good score in my ranking system. I've given it an extra half star for the intensely moody, evocative language, the authentic-sounding revelations of decidedly non-Western cultural attitudes, and the psychological insights such as this:"Yet she also thought having dreams, the very concept of having a dream, was childish and absurd. Why did one need to have illusions like that in order to live? Living was not a project with a propaganda film driving it. It was pulled along by mystery and pleasure, not by a desire to have a big house in Neuilly by the time she was forty." (page 181)And this, about the child soldiers who slaughtered in the name of the Khmer Rouge during the 1975 revolution:"It was their extreme youth that explained their ecstatic sadism and skill at killing. It was a skill which only came from a knowing enjoyment, and therefore it was a youthful knowledge, a dementia of immaturity." (page 284)And this:"It was strange, indeed, how human beings liked to be taken places they didn't know. It was the impulse that lay behind a lot of otherwise inexplicable events." (page 264)This novel took me to places I didn't know. And it was a memorable journey.
    • 3/5
      Hunters in the Dark is written by a man. Perhaps this is a strange thing to say about a book, but it is that particular kind of writing that lets you know that it is certainly a white man of privilege who is well aware (and perhaps a bit humble and defiant) about his privilege, his manhood and his ex-pat blues, that particular way of writing that Hemingway, for example, had. It's hard to describe it, and I am sure others have done a much better job of describing it, but it is unmistakable, and so it is either the type of writing you like or you don't. I, for one, don't like this kind of writing, but I can't say Hunters in the Dark is not worth reading. I could say it is really a matter of taste. Despite this kind of writing, the ex-pats in Hunters in the Dark are a bit vague. Perhaps it is their nature to be vague, aimlessly wandering, drifting, through poverty and war stricken lands of other people's homes, crashing here and there, leaving dents, not looking back... Despite all the internal dialogs about why one drifts, why this aimlessness, why this existential crisis, I left the book not really knowing why. Perhaps Osborne's intention is precisely that; it is unknowable why. The motivations and daily lives of the Cambodians are somewhat clearer, their disdain for the barangs, their struggle to make ends meet, or their aimless, rich lives full of parties and drugs and disdain for the lower classes. Somehow the book had a better grip on "the other" than the "self."Thus, the most memorable characters are the taxi driver (Ouksa) and the policeman, both Cambodian men who do not hesitate to grab an opportunity when it presents itself, no matter how morally or ethically questionable the decision might be. In this desperation, the whole nation is laid bare, emerging from a war that, we are reminded repeatedly, killed one-fourth of the population, emerging, as one character describes, in a way that leaves them unable ever to love again. The existential ramblings bring the plot, in a slow, meandering way, to a rather more action-packed last 100 pages, but perhaps 150 plus pages is a bit too long to get there. The oppressive weather and the aimless and seemingly inconsequential decisions along the way do not suffice to build a thrill, but once that thing that's supposed to happen happens, the story flows easier. In a way, it's like waiting for the rain to come down, getting drenched, and then finally, enjoying the dry, hot weather after the storm has passed (which, incidentally, happens every ten pages or so).Recommended for those who like sugarcane fields, up-cycled furniture, and iced coffee.Thanks to LibraryThing and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
    • 3/5
      Hunters in the Dark left me with a few mixed feelings. The overall descriptive writing is wonderful, the character development not so much. I could only read 4 or 5 pages at a time up to the middle, then another decline into not really wanting to read it more than 4/5 pages at a time. I would never compare this to Patricia Highsmith or Alfred Hitchcock as was said in the blurb. Instead, I would say it's more like Elmore Leonard without the flair. In short, not bad, but don't expect too much.
    • 3/5
      Reading Hunters in the Dark was a pleasant surprise for me. I have not read books by Lawrence Osborne prior to this, let alone heard of him! A little research on the internet tells me he is a British novelist who lives a nomadic life, and his non-fiction, The Wet and the Dry, chronicles his travels through Islamic countries in search for booze. How amusing!? So it is no wonder the main protagonist of Hunters in the Dark, Robert Grieve, would also have some of Lawrence Osborne’s adventurous traits.Robert Grieve is an unmarried Englishman. His life as a teacher of English Literature has never been exciting, so he looks forward to his travels to escape his mundane life. When his money has almost run out in Bangkok, but right when he starts getting used to the South East Asian heat, some backpackers mention Cambodia to him."They portrayed Cambodia as a tough paradise where you could live even cheaper than you could in Bangkok. He learned all about the gambling buses that went to the border from Lumpini Park every morning at 5 a.m. and the $3 flophouses in Battambang where you could live “like a fish.”With only $100 in hand he crosses the border and enters Cambodia, hoping to return after a short visit. But when he wins $2000 (which will take one a long way in Cambodia) on his very first night at a casino, how can he resist the temptation to stay awhile and go missing from the life that waits back in England? Thus begins the tale of Robert Grieve, “a bag of jinxed money, a suave American, a trunk full of heroin, a hustler driver, and a rich doctor’s daughter.”This novel, a ‘literary suspense’, is full of twists and turns in every corner. It is completed with an evil principal antagonist, Davuth, a corrupt policeman with prejudices against “barangs”. However, it not the evocative narrative or Osborne’s splendid prose of Cambodia that captivated me, but the character of Robert Grieve. When life threw curve balls at him, even when he knew the perpetrators, he never got aggressive, and instead tried to find a silver lining. One might find him naive – tad bit too naive for a twenty-eight year old – and wonder “how a man could remain so beautifully ignorant and innocent”, but who would not wish for it, to be blissfully ignorant and hold on to childhood innocence?
    • 1/5
      This was a book I received through the early reviewers program and it looked intriguing. Sadly, I found it to be a rather unfulfilling experience, especially after having seen it compared to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". Unfortunately, Osborne, having done an exceptional job with atmosphere, failed to breathe life into his protagonist, Robert Grieve, who comes across as less than one-dimensional. Essentially, he is non-dimensional, no form, no substance, a being who fails to exude any reason why the reader should care in the least about him in any regard. I had hoped Lawrence Osborne would take us on a journey with Grieve where he might grow in some fashion, where we would find out why we should be interested in his non-life, however, for me, that never occurred. It is difficult to be interested in a non-entity, a being with no substance, no character, and perhaps, most telling, one who seems, by the design of the author, to lack both the ability and interest in becoming a person of substance and/or character. As to Robert Grieve, there was no there, there. Karma alone is a rickety branch on which to hang a tale....
    • 3/5
      Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne is all about atmosphere, the atmosphere of Cambodia which I knew little about before reading this book. If you have ever traveled there this book will take you back, I am sure. Unfortunately, the first 100 pages or so are so slow that had this not been an Early Reviewer copy, I would not have finished the book. I really didn't care about any of the characters and the story became obvious and uninteresting. That said, I don't read a lot of dark thrillers, so if you do, this one might be just what you are looking for and you should give it a try.
    • 4/5
      This dark tale, steeped in superstition and karma, kept me engaged to the end. Nearly all the characters we meet are wizened by their experiences with poverty and war; they are savvy about life and human nature, always looking for an edge to get ahead. This is contrasted by the protagonist, Robert, a young and disillusioned Englishman who is just trying to escape the boredom and disconnectedness he feels with his schoolteacher life. As a reader I became a little frustrated with Robert's naïveté, but I also appreciated the innocence that he brought to situations. Identity swapping, drug deals, a rotating bag of money, and steamy Cambodian location help keep the plot moving along.
    • 3/5
      I liked, but didn't love this book. The style of the writing gives you a sense of place and tone. I kept trying to see if I thought that in some sense there was a connection to the heart of darkness because of the similarity in the title. And I finished it still not clear
    • 4/5
      Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne is an absorbing story of Robert, an English schoolteacher who goes to Cambodia on a holiday which changes his life. The characters are interesting, and the story unfolds as a mystery which leaves the reader guessing, but is satisfied in the end. I enjoyed the style of Osborne's writing and intend to read more of his writings. I recommend this book as a satisfying and interesting read.
    • 5/5
      Hunters in the Dark is a true novel of place, saturated with rich description of rural and urban Cambodia, but unlike many novels where the location is the main character, it has a well-paced plot and rounded, believable actors, and manages to take on two or three original themes.There's really very little not to like. I struggled at first with what seemed like a lot of sentence fragments, a self-consciously abrupt descriptive style, but this irritant soon went away (and I think it was a case of the book's style bedding down rather than my getting used to it). The plot does contain one or two extraordinary coincidences, even for a place (as the book reminds us) as small and incestuous as Cambodia.The horrors of the Khmer Rouge loom increasingly in the background but never dominate the novel. It's a very nuanced working out of the impact history has (or the lack of it) on people and society. Similarly, the discussion of the barang's place in a rapidly modernising Cambodia is intelligent and multifaceted. The interactions between Khmer and Westerner are very deftly handled; there are no innocents and no unredeemables here and everyone's motivations are subtly unfolded. It's also one of the best fictional explorations I've read of the 2008/09 economic crash's impact on young Westerners, although this is only tangential to the story.The conclusion also manages to be satisfyingly in keeping with the rest of the story and neither foregone nor a let-down. But over everything looms the drenched, haunted, convoluted landscape of rivers, peaks and temples, the closeness and slowness of villages and the wild diversity and unpredictability of Phnom Penh. As well as weather and landscape, food is used wonderfully to build atmosphere. A novel to make you think, feel, and hunger for fermented fish. I read it in three sittings.
    • 4/5
      Having recently returned from a month-long trip to SE Asia, including several days in Cambodia and Laos, it was a welcome surprise to have this early reviewer book waiting for me. In a sense, it extended my vacation, particularly time spend in Luang Prabang and Phnom Penh. It took awhile to get into the story, but I was soon hooked and thoroughly enjoyed it. The lives of expats in this part of the world and the impact they have on the local population is complex. The author has done a great job of creating character profiles that are very believable. I highly recommend the book.
    • 4/5
      I've heard 'Hunters in the Dark' described as being Graham Greene-like, and I'd tend to agree. Its setting is exotic, lots of foreigners are encountered, and characters are damaged and conflicted. I initially had an issue with the slow pace of the story but the longer I stuck with it, the more I appreciated the author's skill and restraint.I won't get into plot specifics other than to say the setting is Thailand/Cambodia and it's essentially the story of a young unmarried Englishman who decides he wants to vanish for awhile. He happens to win a chunk of money in a casino very early in the book, and this wealth becomes a part of the story but stays in the background through most of it. Karma, the concept of karma, superstition, and Asian thought processes play huge roles in 'Hunters in the Dark'. The plot isn't all that complex and the pace is slow, but what I really appreciated most about this novel is the way the author's technique and pace perfectly matched the flow of the story. After realizing early on in my reading experience for this book that it's not a normal mystery or thriller and that its milieu has such a profound effect on how the story unwinds, I thoroughly enjoyed 'Hunters in the Dark'.
    • 4/5
      Set mainly in Cambodia, Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence Osborne is a novel about a British teacher named Robert Grieve who has no love for his life or work. He travels to various places during school holidays and always comes back to resume his boring and clockwork life. Except for this time when he travels to the border of Cambodia where he ends up winning big at a casino and spontaneously decides to cross into Cambodia and disappear. He is not sure if he is just extending his trip or leaving the life he knows for good. Events soon occur that make Robert's excursion much different than he could ever have imagined. Hunters in the Dark is very atmospheric and really pulls the reader into the sights and smells and sounds of Southeast Asia. It moves rather slowly at times but keeps your attention. You do get invested in knowing how things will turn out for Robert.(Review based on complimentary Advance Reader copy.)
    • 3/5
      Hunters in the Dark is an atmospheric journey through the Southeast Asia where the atmosphere overshadows the plot. In fact, the author uses the plot as a means to explore the setting and the characters as the primary focus of the novel.
    • 4/5
      Lawrence Osborne is a British writer who calls Bangkok, Thailand, home. As such, he is well acquainted with the cultures of that part of the world and how they change as one crosses from border to border in the region. Hunters in the Dark, in fact, begins with the book’s main character, an Englishman by the name of Robert Grieve, crossing into Cambodia at a border crossing that country shares with Thailand. Grieve is a schoolteacher with only very tenuous ties to his work or, it seems, to his country. He considers himself to be somewhat of a world traveler during his off time and, although he greatly overestimates his own survival skills, likes to extend himself further and further into the unknown with each succeeding trip. However, unlike so many Westerners who come to the Far East looking for women and gambling, Grieve is in Cambodia simply as much to experience its atmosphere as for any other reason. As fate would have it (and this book is very much about fate and karma), Grieve’s one big night in a local casino paints a neon target on his back for all the local hustlers to see, including Simon Beauchamp, an American who knows exactly how the game is played in Cambodia. Grieve is no match for a man like Simon Beauchamp, and when their paths cross, that becomes obvious even to him. But even in the aftermath of that encounter, the ever-passive Grieves is still hoping to find a way to chuck his old life and begin a new one in Cambodia - and when he gets a well paying job as English tutor to a beautiful young woman, he begins to believe that he might just be able to pull it all off.Despite its exotic locale and the decadent lifestyle described, Hunters in the Dark will never be (nor should it be) characterized as a thriller. That is not what Lawrence Osborne was going for here. Instead, Osborne has written a highly atmospheric novel charged throughout with a static electricity of background tension that promises an explosion at any moment. All the while, our hero is content to wait around to see what happens next. Anything it seems, beats the life he left behind in England – unless it actually gets him killed.Bottom Line: Hunters in the Dark is one of those books where the reader keeps waiting for something exciting to happen – and finally figures out that whether or not it happens is beside the point. This is a book about fate and what happens to those who buck it. Come to think of it, Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this one.
    • 4/5
      Lawrence Osborne knows Cambodia well as evidenced by his descriptions of the food, culture, landscape, and people in his newest novel - Hunters in the Dark. Some books focus on character, some on plot, and some on setting. This is a novel with its spotlight on setting. All armchair travelers interested in the seedier, darker side of Cambodia will enjoy this story, as I did. You can taste the dust from your seat in the back of a tuk tuk. There is murder, mayhem, superstition and an extremely oblivious English teacher at the center of it all. Enjoyable!
    • 4/5
      Robert, a disaffected literature teacher from England, goes on vacations each summer, subconsciously hoping to find a place of belonging, something that he never feels in his normal, dull, aimless existence. He believes he may have found his true place when he assumes another's identity in Cambodia. The suspense in this literary novel moves from a mild meditation on identity to curiosity regarding fate and karma. Nonetheless, the dark, exotic atmosphere and events drive the reader to delve more deeply into the deceptions. The main characters are well drawn, many passages are beautifully written and insightful. Sophal, a young Khmer doctor remembers finding a Khmer man in Paris who lived through Pol Pot's revolution; he has committed suicide. "There was an anterior history, a shared history that was written upon the unconscious,and she understood it...[her boyfriend] told her, in his calm European way, that ghosts didn't exist and she thought cruelly, the divide between us is enormous, isn't it?"Recommended.
    • 4/5
      Book review: The Hunters in the Dark by Lawrence OsborneThe Hunters in the Dark start out by creating a languid , the desultory mood that perfectly fits the story. Osborne drew me in so well that even with a break of several days I was immediately able to return to Cambodia. And I did indeed feel as if I were there even though it's a country totally unfamiliar to me I could feel the heat and humidityRobert seemed a little too naive for his age but as the story progressed, all the various characters were very real. There was enough narrative inspection to achieve this without becoming tedious.The story is very open or not informative. Nothing was predictable. There is a definite tension that kept me turning the page. The and isn't particularly concise, tests but it is satisfactory the primary attention is resolved and there is a sense of character growth.I would have liked a little more of Sophal's thoughts and feelings at the end, but she wasn't the main character and it may be a good thing that Osborne did not attempt to understand a woman's reactions to the circumstances.Definitely a book I would reread.
    • 4/5
      The high point of this novel clearly is its exotic setting. Osborne deftly uses what he has learned as a travel writer to evoke the edginess and intrigue of post-Pol Pot Cambodia. This is a small country where it is impossible to keep secrets, like a naïve barang winning a large amount of money in a border casino operated by former Khmer Rouge thugs. Cambodia has an ancient history that has been lost except for the many ruins dotting the jungle—we visit several in the novel. Phnom Penh and its surroundings reek of atmosphere: heat, humidity, torrential rains, traffic, strange taxies, colonies of bats and, of course, abundant mosquitoes. The people are steeped in mysticism and a belief in the power of karma to determine fate. But most important for the purposes of this novel, it is a country traumatized by a brutal genocide that has marked its people with distrust, acceptance of death and ruthlessness including, a taste for the con. “Her father had a fine phrase for it which he had found in the history books: hunters in the dark. It came from medieval Japan and referred to the restless courtiers of the Imperial Court always hunting for their own advantage.” Osborne uses this dark mood to create a sense of foreboding that draws the reader into his story. Osborne has three main themes: the differences between East and West, the role that luck or karma can play in life, and the impact of identity on human interactions. His protagonist is Robert Grieve, a 28 year-old English schoolteacher, who uses his summer vacations to escape what he sees as the torpor and boredom of his village life in England. Iceland and Greece prove to be too tame, so he saves up for a trip to Thailand. He is hopelessly naïve and his Western education is desperately inadequate to cope with what he finds in Cambodia. In short, Robert is the perfect “mark.” News of his casino winnings puts a target on his back that results in his being set adrift but with the serendipitous opportunity to try on a new and more exciting identity. This proves successful with a young a European educated Khmer woman, Sophal, the daughter of the rich physician who ostensibly hires Robert to teach his daughter English, but actually seems to be more interested in having him as a son-in-law. The remainder of the characters in the novel are like a school of hungry sharks circling Robert: Simon Beaucamp is an urbane Yale-educated American drug dealing expat looking for his next mark; Ouksa is a scheming driver with a sick wife, who he uses to justify all kinds of atrocities; Davuth is a chillingly corrupt policeman who committed murders in the Khmer Rouge genocide; and Sothea is a drug-addicted prostitute with a certain ghost-like quality. This ensemble is indeed interesting and following their actions becomes compulsive. However, interspersed within the travelogue, Osborne’s unfolds his plot as a series of incidents that seem almost inevitable, often breaking the mood and leaving the reader totally incredulous. I realize it is a small country and all, but come on!
    • 4/5
      Robert is a 28 year old Englishman, a schoolteacher who is unhappy with his existence at home. He therefore finds himself in Cambodia alone during his holidays. While entertaining the idea of what it would be like to just disappear from his own life, fate helps him along the way when he meets an American man and his local girlfriend. Eventually, he meets Sophal when he decides to teach English as a way to earn money. But, just when he thinks he could live a new life in a new country events take on a life of their own. Previous characters he has meet along the way are drawn together into a web of lies and danger. Is it fate or karma and how will it effect Robert? Initially, I thought the first few chapters were slow going and I wasn't particularly keen on the style of writing which seemed flat and a tad boring. But, as I kept going I was rewarded with a tale that became darker and more thrilling. It flowed languorously, like the rivers in the book downwards into an unknown horizon connecting the characters and events in twisting and turning ways that I hadn't anticipated. With the rumbling of thunder and the lashing rain in the background, the weather became a character on its own, making the story humid, dark and foreboding. Overall, it was an enjoyable and gripping story that left me thinking a lot about human nature. It's perfect for those who like suspense in an exotic location.Thanks to Blogginforbooks.com for allowing me to read this book in exchange for an honest review.
    • 3/5
      This is a well-written story of intrigue, splashy with local color of life in modern Cambodia. The plot following the tribulations of naïve British teacher Robert Grieve thrown into the depths of another culture ticks right along and keeps the pages turning. My only criticism is that the author’s obvious familiarity with the setting bleeds through to his protagonist, making him a little too comfortable with the alien world he finds himself in.
    • 4/5
      Suspenseful, entertaining, engrossing and really well-written. I'd like to dwell on the last comment a bit - it's possible (and I'd say fairly common) to have a book hit the first three, but the really well-written to a level that you start thinking of some of the late greats (I believe Graham Greene was invoked somewhere and i don't disagree) is something altogether different.I think fans of Graham Greene will enjoy this. The mood, the atmosphere and the characters are all described at a topnotch level.
    • 2/5
      I see others gave this book really good reviews but for me I just couldn't get into it. I read 14 chapters but didn't finish, it just didn't hold my attention and really struggled to get that far.
    • 5/5
      In this beautifully written but dark and haunting novel Robert Grieves, an astonishingly naive and rudderless Englishman, becomes enmeshed in the illusory atmosphere of present day Cambodia. From the very beginning we can feel Robert misreading the intents of the people around him and at the same time responding to this exotic land which is so different from the staid English village life he has previously known. Although the novel is not about the Pol Pot regime it is in the background of the novel and explains much of the dismissal of death and the ruthlessness that forms the background of the older generation. The themes of luck and the Buddhist notion of Dhamma are also explored in the path that Robert takes as he meets the drug dealer Simon, has his money stolen, recovers his bearings in Phnom Penh where he meets and has an affair with Sophal then again comes within the sphere of the corrupt taxi driver Ouksa and the degenerate policeman Davuth. If the ending is a little too pat, still the author does an excellent job of immersing us in the culture and landscape of Cambodia and the edge one feels in a foreign and possibly dangerous place.
    • 4/5
      The book literally starts in no man's land as the central character Robert crosses the border check-point from Thailand into Cambodia. Robert is adrift in both body and soul as he finds himself going further and further to escape his life as a teacher in England which he finds vaguely dissatisfying. Still, he is not your typical seeker of spiritual enlightenment by any means. When Robert wins big at a casino it opens up opportunities to continue his travels while additionally marking him as a target for opportunists. Osborne creates a palpable sense of atmosphere which generates tension as Robert encounters other characters among the people and places of Cambodia. The author clearly has a strong feeling for the Khmer people and the wounds left on the country by the genocide inflicted by the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s. As well as an even deeper sense of melancholy created by the ancient ruins of places like Angkor Wat which finds the Khmer people living among ghosts and reminders of their former greatness. If Robert ultimately takes a circular karmic journey, which ends up a little pat, then it still remains an atmospheric and sensual trip worth taking.
    • 3/5
      As one reviewer stated "a heart of darkness dwells in each of us." I read this novel on several levels. Having spent some time in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, I too could identify with the described darkness. His character development and plot construction were great! Grieve I feel did not have an entirely realistic perception of the people or the area in the beginning. But as the stories develop it seemed more real. I found the people once you gained their trust. I think he captured the culture, and way of life completely. A very enjoyable once you let it draw in into its characters, and pace! A great book for anyone looking for adventure.