Customer Reviews

Mekong

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Paul Adirex is a great writer. He has a very good imagination in combining history, religion, and his own imagination to write Mekong. When you read this piecve of art, you will learn not only the lifestyle of rural area people, but you will learn about Buddhism as well. He has included the teaching of Lord Buddha in the novel. Worth reading!!!

I like all four books by Paul Adirex ( Pirates of Tarutao, Mekong, Until the Karma Ends, King Kong Effect ), but Mekong is my favourite, although it is the most difficult one to get into initially.
In places Mekong manages to walk that fine dividing line between myth and reality, such that you are not always sure which is being encountered.

Mekong is a exciting and interesting story about special forces searching MIAs (Missing in Action)from the vietnam war, a woman wich wants to find a tribe named Puri and a engineer which finds his way to his self. You learn a lot of the foreign culture and the behavior of the people in south east asia. It was a helpful and interesting expirience to understand the poeple from this area. Paul Adirex is a author who can bring history, excitement and mysticism in one.

I have seldom seen a writer make such poor use of such fantastically rich material. The plot is solid, even potentially fascinating, and the blend of myth, history, culture and imagination is an embarrasment of riches. But technically, Adirex is a poor writer, at least in the English language. His use of dialogue is particularly poor - wooden and stilted. Anyone who ends a phone conversation with "I've got to go now" (and he does this on numerous occasions) is struggling. Characterization is equally poor - more like cardboard cutouts with little of the depth you expect from good writing.

Reading this book was a very frustrating experience for me. I expected so much and the author certainly had the raw material to deliver. But he simply does not have the technical skills. Perhaps the book's greatest use is as a resource for creative writing classes where teachers demonstrate poor technique and use passages for students to practise improving the poor quality writing.