T.S. Eliot has written: "I think that the river / Is a strong brown god -- sullen, untamed and intractable." In addition to this, a river is also an endlessly interesting artery that carries on its stirring surface the history and most of the qualities of its country.
Such a river is Thailand's Chao Phya, the waterway that traverses its intractable length from the upper reaches all the way to Bangkok and the Gulf of Siam.
From Chiang Mai through Sukhothai and Ayuthaya, it traces the country's history, displaying along its course the infancy, adolescence and maturity of Thailand itself.
Siam, the former name of the country, can mean "people of the river" and that river is the Chao Phya. It can be difficult (the portage sections) and sullen (the 1942 Bangkok flood, the city submerged for weeks), but it is also life-affirming in the literal and all other senses.
It makes possible rice, that "food of life"; holds hoards of fish, floats forests to market; hosts whole waterborne communities; informs the spirits of the shores; and is celebrated in feasts and festivals.
Bangkok was once a capital of boat-filled canals. These riverine houses rose and fell with the changing water level, as the "streets" were already under water.
Joseph Conrad, viewing it in 1917, found it "an expanse of brown houses of bamboo . . . sprung out of the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river. These houses of sticks and grass, like the nests of an aquatic race, clung to the low shores -- others seemed to grow out of the water . . . in the very middle of the stream."
This life-giving artery has impressed and inspired many a viewer, and now a longtime resident of the country has given us a big and beautiful book about all of these aspects of the great river that so nourishes his adopted land.
Steve Van Beek has called his book a reflection of perceptions about the Chao Phya. "It endeavors to portray the various aspects of the river in the mode of a movie in which individual scenes convey little more than a glimpse but, when assembled, tell a story."
The author comes well prepared for his task. He has written more than 20 books and made more than 40 documentary films, mostly about Thailand and its rivers. He has also had vast personal experience, having paddled most of his country's waterways.
His best-known work is "Slithering South," an enthralling report of his two-month canoe journey down the Ping and Chao Phya Rivers, which "The Nation" called "the best travel book ever written about Thailand." In addition he has published a more scholarly (Oxford University Press) account: "The Chao Phya: River in Transition."
Carried once again on the muscular waves of this brown god, Van Beek now gives us what might be called a riverine breviary -- all the hymns, psalms and prayers associated with the Chao Phya, as well as the flora and fauna, the history and the legends, the games, the poems, a whole compendium devoted to a single waterway. Was there ever, I wonder, a better book about a river.
This strata-filled story is lavishly illustrated, pictures on every page -- maps, photos back then and right now, small details and grand vistas, the majority taken by Van Beek himself -- making this book a full experience, one reflecting the author's great respect and love for this astonishing river.
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