First, it has superb descriptions of the Thai jungle. Fauna, flora and the atmosphere of the mountains are brought to life in lush and vivid strokes.
Second, it is an adventure story with a simple plot: a hunter loses his way in the jungle as he pursues a barking deer he has wounded; when he realizes he is being stalked by a tiger, he clambers up a tree and, after a night of terror and self-pity, finally musters enough courage to confront the king of the jungle.
Third, it is an allegory of the times. The young man is the archetypal Thai leftist militant of the 1970s: self-righteous to the point of arrogance; honest, responsible and dedicated, yet unhappy with the system and quick to claim his legal rights and to blame others, the local authorities as well as those closest to him – his uneducated wife, even his father, whose well-meaning ambition destroyed his own dream. He is an angry, resentful rebel who perceives himself primarily as a victim. He is in self-imposed exile in the jungle, “in order to avoid confrontation with certain people over certain events” – an allusion to the murdering frenzy of right-wing mobs and goons in the 1970s. On several occasions in the past, he has shied away from violent confrontation, as leftist demonstrators consistently did until they were forced to take up arms. Once his ordeal is over, he will go back home with nothing to show for his trouble, lucky enough to still be alive and free. In the novel, as in society, the time for divisive political infighting is over.
Finally, it is a metaphysical novel in which events build up to a cathartic climax, when the hunter absorbs the attributes of the tiger and thus becomes the tiger and negates its challenge. The confrontation ends in stalemate, with no winner or loser, as man and beast go their separate ways.
The main theme is self-discovery, as the young man faces the challenge of not only a hostile environment but also and above all his inner turmoil. Forced into confrontation with the tiger, he masters his own terror and discovers “a side of himself he had never known”. His self-control leads to peace of mind, and this newly found equanimity allows him to think clearly and discover the way back home. He also realizes that most of his suffering, fears and anxieties are self-made.
The hunter returns home empty-handed but rich in wisdom: he has found his moral bearings, transcended his own shortcomings, seen through his delusions and discovered the paramount importance of “stillness”. Unlike the old monk who wanders in the wilderness unharmed, he achieves all this without the amulet of “faith”, as faith is merely a (religious) means to an end, that of self-control. While distancing his hero from religious practice, the author holds to a fundamental Buddhist tenet: the need to still all passions to achieve enlightenment.
In its intensity and focus, The path of the tiger strongly reminds readers of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Indeed, it could have been titled “The young man and the jungle”. But its moral is altogether different. Hemingway’s novel is about man’s noble, unavoidable yet ultimately absurd mission (the fisherman’s daunting fight with a huge fish which, once caught, turns into a set of bones), whereas the path of the tiger leads to self-control and equanimity.
The short confrontation with the tiger builds the tragic tension. The ending has an ironic twist, when the hunter realizes that the tiger ignored him because it had eaten the barking deer and was full. The tiger has succeeded where he has failed – by securing his next meal, whereas he only managed to wound the deer. Unlike man, who keeps wanting more, the tiger knows when to quit once sated.
This ending subtly mocks man’s greed and gratuitous violence, as well as his lingering delusions. Even our hunter’s self-discovery is based on a misunderstanding: he wasn’t saved by his self-control or at any rate not by self-control alone, but by the tiger’s postprandial benevolence. Equanimity gives man control over himself, but not necessarily over the outside world, where other factors are at play.
I am not sure whether the author, who prefers to reduce everything to a personal equation, will accept this point. He stresses that it is only when the hunter has achieved stillness in his mind that he thinks of the sure way to get back home. But this is a delusion, because the option of following streams was not viable for the hunter as long as he was being hunted, and it still would not be possible if the tiger were around and hungry. In other words, beyond personal feelings or wisdom, there are outside, objective factors that force us to react, disturb our concentration and compel us to change our plans and our moods; we are not alone in the world, the world is constantly impinging on us. By focussing exclusively on personal factors, the writer, in this novel, dismisses too easily the social, economic and political conditions that are part and parcel of life.*
Part of the appeal of this novel is its extremely dense, precise and lyrical style. Vinai Boonchuay writes in such telegraphic Thai, however, that he upsets many readers in the vernacular, who are at once entranced by his coruscating cascades of adjectives and befuddled by the systematic absence of subjects. Unlike Western languages, which usually go by the subject-verb-complement structure, Thai allows the subject to be done away with when it is implicitly understood, but Vinai – blaming his editor-cum-publisher... – is pushing this to the extreme and the reader is too often left wondering who is doing what to whom. The English language does not encourage such paucity, and it has been particularly challenging for us to figure out what the heck this miserly magician was referring to and fill in the gaps and gulps of his breathlessly bouncy prose. I dare say that this translation is, of necessity, more legible (if less sonorous and less taut) than the original.