John Lathrop

The character of Zainab in an (imaginary) scene from The End of the Monsoon

How much is too much?

A few nights ago I watched ‘Chloe’, the latest Atom Egoyan film.  It’s a thriller about a wife who suspects her husband of infidelity, and who hires a prostitute to test his fidelity.  There’s a significant amount of sex in the film, most of it verbally described by the actress Amanda Seyfried.  Her acting is so good, the verbal description is more disturbing than a straightforward image.  Wanting to learn more about the film, I looked it up on Wikipedia.  There I discovered that it belongs to a previously unknown (to me) sub-genre, the erotic thriller.

Why, in the 21st century, do we have a sub-genre for a thriller with sex as a strong plot and character device?  My British publisher’s assistant editor, a young literary man recently down from Oxford or Cambridge, complained when reading the manuscript of my political thriller The End of the Monsoon that it contained too much sex.  My first reaction was: read more »

Photograph: Khin Maung

and karma as inspiration for The End of the Monsoon

It was in a bookstore in the old Hong Kong airport in the mid ’90s that I picked up the first book I read by Aung San Suu Kyi.  I have it still.  It is called The Voice of Hope, and is a collection of conversations she had with Alan Clements. 

Suu Kyi has put Burma on the map, and when I needed a prisoner of conscience for the plot of The End of the Monsoon (I was living in Cambodia), I naturally thought of her.  read more »

In search of theme and setting

In March of 2007 I sold my first novel, The Desert Contract, in a two book deal, which meant I had to write another political thriller.  But about what, and set where?

That summer, while finishing the publisher’s suggested revisions, I read Karen Armstrong’s  A Short History of Myth.  The final pages held my attention.  She suggests that read more »