Setting & Theme

I decided to write this post in coordination with the release of my novel, The Waiting Room, partly because reviewing Emma Holt’s edits forced my head back to Cambodia, and partly because, for those of you who have already read the novel, I thought a discussion about setting in the story might be interesting.

Not all good erotica requires intricate settings. I have read extremely good erotic fiction that only just grazed over the issue of where the story was taking place. Erotica is really about characters and what they do to each other, both physically and mentally. However, for me, setting is incredibly important; in essence, it is the first thing I have decided upon when I start hatching a tale in my mind.

I may write about people I don’t know, in situations I haven’t been in, doing things to each other that I haven’t done, but of all the stories I’ve penned, only two are set in places I don’t know well: Gaijin (I’ve been to Tokyo, but did not spend any significant time there) and Tales of the Mumbai Coven (partially set in Mumbai – I’ve only ever been to the airport).

For me, being familiar with a setting is an important grounding. It forms the environment in which my characters are either tempted or pressured into behaving in ways they might not normally behave. And just like environment forces mutations in evolutionary terms, so the setting provides impetus for my characters to change. Very often, it is the setting that pushes them together and causes friction between them.

I set The Waiting Room in Cambodia because of all the places I have ever stayed for any considerable length of time it is by far the most tragic. The ruined temple complex of Angkor speaks of the glories of the Khmer Empire. I’ve seen it utterly deserted at sunrise when nothing stirs but the rats and the ghosts of Buddhist monks, chanting their morning sutras.

“I saw her first at the temples, you know, in Angkor. She was oblivious to everything but the architecture. In fact, it was her intense focus that caught my eye; she could have been utterly alone. She stood there, thin and willowy, in an awful, shabby cotton dress; it was far too big for her. She was so beautiful, Marcus, you can’t imagine.”

It sits almost at the edge of one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes, the Tonle Sap, which in the dry season shrinks to less that a few hundred kilometers squared and only a meter deep. In the wet season, when the Mekong eerily reverses its flow, it swells to over 16,000 square kilometers. It is a place of strange miracles.

This is the same country that, less than 35 years ago, slaughtered almost a third of its own population during the reign of Pol Pot. Anyone who wasn’t ethnically Khmer, anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone with a higher degree was slated for extermination in a regime with a psychotic terror of every sort of sophistication. If you could do more than farm rice – you probably wouldn’t have survived. In 1975, the forces of the Khmer Rouge took over the capital, Phnom Penh, and systematically purged it of its inhabitants. Year Zero, as they proclaimed it, began in a city inhabited by nothing but ghosts.

In the dark, the city looked less ragged; spotlights lit the tropical palms along Monivong Boulevard but, as they turned towards the Tonle Sap River, the roads were unpaved and ravaged by the recent rains.

Moc chattered away in surprisingly good English. In his early fifties, he explained that he had once been a history teacher, before year zero, but that he had forgotten how to read under the Khmer Rouge, which is why he drove a taxi now.

“How is it possible to forget how to read?” Sophie asked him gently but incredulously.

“My father was teacher also—he was killed in front of me. So…then…I forget how to read quick.”

Does it matter that most of the readers of the book won’t be all that familiar with Cambodia’s history or geography? Not really. It’s a nice horny D/s story. But for those of you who do know a little about the setting, the contrast between these two foreigners – their fears, their sense of self and of their own histories – and the place they find themselves in becomes significant.

Buddhism is really about learning one’s place in the universe and all those beautiful ruined temples were built, at one time, as a setting in which people could reach that enlightenment.

The Khmer Rouge came to power as a reaction to Cambodia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It was extensively, though secretly, bombed in an attempt to flush the Viet Cong and NVA out of their safe-havens across the border from Vietnam. Meanwhile, the government in power at the time, sided with the US, equally terrified of what seemed to much of the Western world as the inevitable and creeping spread of Communism. The punishment endured by many rural Cambodians during the bombings drove thousands of them into the arms of what Pol Pot’s movement of ‘liberation from Western hegemony’. This was, in a way, an attempt by an entire nation to redefine itself beyond the context of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and most of all, Western understandings of nationhood. The results are well documented in the film ‘The Killing Fields’, if you are interested.

By setting the story in Cambodia, I was attempting to make associations between how individuals try to understand and redefine themselves and the way nations do it. It can be exhilarating, but it can also be horrific. Moreover, I wanted to say something about being an outsider, not only in the sense that they are foreigners to the culture they find themselves in, but that they are in some way foreigners to themselves. Above all, a point I wanted to make was that, no matter how lightly we try to tread through the world, we are never really just observers. The act of observation changes both the observer and the subject. We are never really neutral – we only fool ourselves that we are. We change what we see, and what we see changes us.

While I was writing the novel and posting it online, there was a wide array of opinions about the scenes that take place beside the lake in Geneva. Another place beside a lake, but half a world away. Initially and, in retrospect I think, immaturely, I thought these chapters set in the civilized, sedate and cold logic of a Swiss city would give the reader a respite – a cooler view – from the irrational intensity taking place in those suffocating hotel rooms in Battangbang and Phnom Penh. But in writing them I learned something: that neither physical distance, nor rationalism really makes sense of something so personal, interior and existential. Only time can bestow that kind of perspective. Ironically, I had instinctively set the Geneva scenes years after the events in Cambodia take place. Sometimes, as a writer, you actually do the right thing without even thinking about it.

Before I finish, I just want to mention something I do find lacking in a lot erotica. I said before that there was a lot of good ‘settingless’ erotic writing, but this doesn’t relieve a writer from describing the story’s microcosm. Too often I find rooms are glossed over in a single sentence. Too often writers don’t tell me what the light looks like, how the air smells, how the sheets feel. No matter what is going on in our minds, we are physical creatures and we perceive our world through our senses. Erotic writing, more than any other kind, should pull the reader into the story sensually. Not just with the sex, but with every form of physicality.

The room upstairs smelled damp and close, the heat and humidity of the day still trapped within the thick walls. It was empty save for a dilapidated ironwork bed with a mean-looking mattress, a ceiling fan and cheap folding chair. At least the bed had mosquito netting around it but the promised air-conditioner was nowhere in sight.

“Fuck!” Sophie dumped her knapsack on the ancient, tiled floor and strode angrily over to a bank of shuttered windows. “That bitch! She said there was air-con!”

She wrestled with the latch on a pair of wooden shutters, finally kicking them open to reveal the night and the dead street below. She was angry for no good reason, she knew. It was the same way all over Indochina; after ten o’clock at night, you settled for whatever you could get.

So, take two people, put them at the edge of a cliff, in a monsoon, and let the games begin. What would be your favourite setting for an erotic story?