From time to time we like to share some good reads with each other on JWD, and now might be a good time to share with you what I'm reading this week.
It's "THE GATE" by Francois Bizot which tells of his experiences as the only Western prisoner to survive the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
In 1971, on a routine outing through the Cambodian countryside, the young French ethnologist Francois Bizot is captured by the Khmer Rouge. Accused of being an agent of "American imperialism", he's imprisoned. His captor, Douch, later responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, interrogates him at length. After three months of interrogation he is freed.
Then four years later, the Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh, the capital, and Bizot stumbles into the unenviable position of official intermediary between the ruthless conqueror and the terrified refugees huddled behind the gate of the French Embassy. Forced to turn away asylum seekers, search for provisions and organise a convoy through hundreds of miles of scorched countryside, Bizot is the only barrier between a genocidal army and his caravan of desperate people.
Much of the 'action' takes place in an area that Mrs Ozzie and I know well and each scene seems to come against the backdrop of what we've personally experienced.
The book has a lengthy foreword by the eminent John le Carre who makes some comments which I found poignant from a Dub perspective. He calls Douch, for example, a "seeker after certainty" and this could well describe not just the dictatorial, authoritarian Khmer Rouge, but also the WTS. They too are seeking the certainty of ready answers and so claim to interpret every last image and verse in the Bible. Not for them the mystery of faith but the peddling of artists' impressions of an imaginary paradise where all of life's woes and struggles are gone and all will be lying in hammocks enjoying a permanent vacation. Just as Douch was a driven man, so are the leaders of the WTS and just as Douch's dream of a peasant utopia evaporated so it is for many who've come to see the truth about "the Troof".
Anyway "The Gate" is published by The Harvill Press, London - a good read!
Now what are you reading right now? Care to share? We'd love to 'hear".
Cheers, Ozzie