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Lightning on the Sun
Lightning on the Sun is a posthumously published first novel by Robert Bingham, a gifted, tragic figure who suffered a fatal heroin overdose in 1999, shortly after completing this book. A largely compelling, sometimes derivative account of a squalid drug deal that goes terribly wrong, Bingham's novel is set primarily in the vividly evoked Cambodia of the mid-1990s, a country that provides the perfect setting for this sharply observed story of greed, faithlessness, and corruption.
Bingham's publishers have compared this novel to the works of Graham Greene, who excelled at depicting burnt-out cases coming to grief in exotic corners of the world. But the major influence behind Lightning on the Sun -- its literary and spiritual ancestor -- is Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, a powerfully written thriller in which a stolen cache of heroin becomes a tangible symbol of the poisoned legacy of Vietnam. Taking his cue -- and much of his plot -- from Stone, Bingham builds his novel around a disaffected young American adrift in Cambodia, looking for the one big score that will turn his life around.
The American in question is Asher, a lost soul of 30 or so who came to Southeast Asia as part of a UNESCO team doing preservation work on Cambodia's ancient monuments. Unemployed in the wake of the UN's departure, and infected by the casual corruption of life in Phnom Penh, Asher loses his bearings. Together with his ex-girlfriend Julie -- a Harvard-educated underachiever currently employed as a bartender in a low-rent Manhattan strip joint -- Asher concocts a plan to purchase a large quantity of cheap heroin on the Cambodian black market and sell it, at an enormous profit, on the streets of New York. Borrowing $3,000 -- and putting himself dangerously in debt to a Phnom Penh loan shark -- Asher acquires several kilos of uncut heroin and ships it to the states in care of an unsuspecting journalist -- and blandly solid "citizen" -- named Reese.
Once the heroin reaches America, everything goes wrong. Changing her plans at the last minute, Julie double-crosses her primary investor, a sleazy "dwarf" named Glen, intercepts the shipment, and sells the drugs herself. After killing the enraged Glen in self-defense, she flees to Cambodia, bringing almost $80,000 in blood money with her. Her long-delayed reunion with Asher is played out against a backdrop of violence, political turmoil, and endemic national corruption. Implicitly embodying the author's belief that nothing good can -- or should -- arise from such a morally compromised transaction, Asher and Julie find themselves caught in a series of events that lead, inexorably, to a bitterly ironic denouement.
For a great deal of the early going, Lightning on the Sun borrows far too heavily from its primary model, and suffers from the inevitable comparison. Dog Soldiers is easily the better of the two novels, and its oblique, nightmarish portrait of the consequences of a disastrous military policy is as effective today as it was more than 25 years ago. Bingham's novel is, by contrast, a young man's book. It relies a bit excessively on coincidence and is filled with moments of arch, overly self-conscious irony. Occasional passages seem under-developed and have about them an unfinished, first-draft quality, a problem that might have been eliminated had Bingham been granted a little more time to polish and revise.
That said, Lightning on the Sun is still the clear product of a talented, ambitious novelist who could have been a contender. Bingham fills his first and only novel with striking turns of phrase, close observation, a keen sense of place, and a comprehensive atmosphere of moral failure. The result is an authoritative portrait of the Anglo/American expatriate community in Southeast Asia, and a frequently frightening evocation of the harsh realities of daily life in modern Cambodia. Robert Bingham had the voice, the eye, and the narrative instincts of a born writer. Given the time to develop his gifts and assimilate his influences, he might have become a major force in the literature of the 21st century. That, of course, is never going to happen now, and we are all a little poorer as a result.
Bingham's publishers have compared this novel to the works of Graham Greene, who excelled at depicting burnt-out cases coming to grief in exotic corners of the world. But the major influence behind Lightning on the Sun -- its literary and spiritual ancestor -- is Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, a powerfully written thriller in which a stolen cache of heroin becomes a tangible symbol of the poisoned legacy of Vietnam. Taking his cue -- and much of his plot -- from Stone, Bingham builds his novel around a disaffected young American adrift in Cambodia, looking for the one big score that will turn his life around.
The American in question is Asher, a lost soul of 30 or so who came to Southeast Asia as part of a UNESCO team doing preservation work on Cambodia's ancient monuments. Unemployed in the wake of the UN's departure, and infected by the casual corruption of life in Phnom Penh, Asher loses his bearings. Together with his ex-girlfriend Julie -- a Harvard-educated underachiever currently employed as a bartender in a low-rent Manhattan strip joint -- Asher concocts a plan to purchase a large quantity of cheap heroin on the Cambodian black market and sell it, at an enormous profit, on the streets of New York. Borrowing $3,000 -- and putting himself dangerously in debt to a Phnom Penh loan shark -- Asher acquires several kilos of uncut heroin and ships it to the states in care of an unsuspecting journalist -- and blandly solid "citizen" -- named Reese.
Once the heroin reaches America, everything goes wrong. Changing her plans at the last minute, Julie double-crosses her primary investor, a sleazy "dwarf" named Glen, intercepts the shipment, and sells the drugs herself. After killing the enraged Glen in self-defense, she flees to Cambodia, bringing almost $80,000 in blood money with her. Her long-delayed reunion with Asher is played out against a backdrop of violence, political turmoil, and endemic national corruption. Implicitly embodying the author's belief that nothing good can -- or should -- arise from such a morally compromised transaction, Asher and Julie find themselves caught in a series of events that lead, inexorably, to a bitterly ironic denouement.
For a great deal of the early going, Lightning on the Sun borrows far too heavily from its primary model, and suffers from the inevitable comparison. Dog Soldiers is easily the better of the two novels, and its oblique, nightmarish portrait of the consequences of a disastrous military policy is as effective today as it was more than 25 years ago. Bingham's novel is, by contrast, a young man's book. It relies a bit excessively on coincidence and is filled with moments of arch, overly self-conscious irony. Occasional passages seem under-developed and have about them an unfinished, first-draft quality, a problem that might have been eliminated had Bingham been granted a little more time to polish and revise.
That said, Lightning on the Sun is still the clear product of a talented, ambitious novelist who could have been a contender. Bingham fills his first and only novel with striking turns of phrase, close observation, a keen sense of place, and a comprehensive atmosphere of moral failure. The result is an authoritative portrait of the Anglo/American expatriate community in Southeast Asia, and a frequently frightening evocation of the harsh realities of daily life in modern Cambodia. Robert Bingham had the voice, the eye, and the narrative instincts of a born writer. Given the time to develop his gifts and assimilate his influences, he might have become a major force in the literature of the 21st century. That, of course, is never going to happen now, and we are all a little poorer as a result.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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272 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
March 11, 2010
I loved this book and was sad to learn that Bingham died of a heroin overdose in 2000. He seemed completely in his element describing the life of a Westerner in Southeast Asia, and I thought the narrative stream utterly entrancing. I wish he'd been able to stay with us longer. He was preternaturally talented. I wonder, when I read this again, if I will feel the same way and I did when I first read it.
August 8, 2007
I can't remember the first time I read this book, but 2004 seems about right. When I read this book, I immediately harbored fantasies about going to Cambodia with a tan man who wore linen pants and loafers and we'd lie on a mattress in a sticky hotel room and try not to get shot by crazy people. I'm glad I got over that fantasy. I don't think I could take Cambodia's heat.
July 21, 2021
[Reviewed in June, 2000]
Robert Bingham’s high-toned thriller, Lightning on the Sun, moves nimbly between Cambodia and New York City. An international cast of characters cross paths when a jaded young American living in Phnom Penh decides to try his luck at smuggling heroin into the United States. The story’s geopolitical backdrop and its climate of moral dissipation are an updating of a genre perfected by Graham Greene and Americanized by Robert Stone. As if to emphasize the pedigree he’s aiming for, Bingham includes a prefatory quotation from The Comedians, Greene’s 1966 novel set in Haiti during the era of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. While it probably comes as no surprise that Lightning on the Sun isn’t in Greene or Stone’s league, it’s nevertheless an ambitious and entertaining first novel. Sadly, the 33-year-old author died last year from a drug overdose just as his book was being prepared for publication. It’s a substantial literary loss. Robert Bingham was a writer of real talent and even greater promise.
The Cambodian opening of Lightning on the Sun is told from the perspective of a thirtyish ex-UNESCO worker named Asher—we never learn his full name—who joined the organization on the rebound from a busted Stateside romance. Bingham, who worked at one time as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily, is particularly good with the details of political instability. This is very much the exhausted and debauched Phnom Penh that Henry Kamm documented two years ago in his book, Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land. Bingham knows the territory, the guerrilla factions, the communist splinter groups, royalists, and brutal government forces. Asher’s end-of-the-road weariness has affinities with a whole tradition of hard-boiled antiheroes:
Asher’s ex-girlfriend is a wisecracking Harvard grad named Julie (referred to by Asher as Julie G-Spot), who is currently slumming as a bartender at a New York strip club. Their affair had “fallen like a dead cat thrown from an apartment building.” Thanks to Julie’s drug-dealing boss Glen—“practically a midget”—unloading smuggled heroin in New York looks like a piece of cake. Like several of the female characters in Bingham’s much-admired 1997 short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value, Julie is a ballbuster with a deadly wit. (When a subsequent lover tosses his spent condom against a hotel room wall, where it sticks with a thud, Julie chimes: “The spaghetti is ready.”)
The novel is less successful with the knuckleheaded slapstick between the double-crossing Glen and his gun-toting black sidekick, Dwayne. Bingham seems to be straining at times for Elmore Leonard’s unique brand of quirky tough-guy comedy, but he doesn’t have Leonard’s ear for lowlife dialogue or the ability to bring something fresh to characters who are little more than stereotypical hoods.
Bingham’s most effective literary milieu, portrayed with frightening immediacy in Pure Slaughter Value, is the crumbled Camelot of East Coast blue bloods and trust fund yuppies. It’s no secret that he knew this world intimately as the heir to a Kentucky newspaper fortune. His own trust fund wealth was such that Bingham never had to work a day in his life. This reality appears to have bred within him—and his characters—a curious mixture of arrogance, self-loathing, substance abuse, and, on occasion, a willful drive for genuine achievement. The strongest sections of Lightning on the Sun are incidental to the novel’s unremarkable story line, but they return Bingham to the corrosive landscape of his short stories.
Robert Bingham’s high-toned thriller, Lightning on the Sun, moves nimbly between Cambodia and New York City. An international cast of characters cross paths when a jaded young American living in Phnom Penh decides to try his luck at smuggling heroin into the United States. The story’s geopolitical backdrop and its climate of moral dissipation are an updating of a genre perfected by Graham Greene and Americanized by Robert Stone. As if to emphasize the pedigree he’s aiming for, Bingham includes a prefatory quotation from The Comedians, Greene’s 1966 novel set in Haiti during the era of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. While it probably comes as no surprise that Lightning on the Sun isn’t in Greene or Stone’s league, it’s nevertheless an ambitious and entertaining first novel. Sadly, the 33-year-old author died last year from a drug overdose just as his book was being prepared for publication. It’s a substantial literary loss. Robert Bingham was a writer of real talent and even greater promise.
The Cambodian opening of Lightning on the Sun is told from the perspective of a thirtyish ex-UNESCO worker named Asher—we never learn his full name—who joined the organization on the rebound from a busted Stateside romance. Bingham, who worked at one time as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily, is particularly good with the details of political instability. This is very much the exhausted and debauched Phnom Penh that Henry Kamm documented two years ago in his book, Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land. Bingham knows the territory, the guerrilla factions, the communist splinter groups, royalists, and brutal government forces. Asher’s end-of-the-road weariness has affinities with a whole tradition of hard-boiled antiheroes:
It had become for [Asher] a soiled city of compromised friendships, of weak links and petty betrayals, years of mixing business and pleasure, of crossing lines, of sharing women and information, of corrupt maneuvering, of tainted favors given and received, and through it all the nightly numbing of his nerves, the dulling of his wits and watering of his brain.
Asher’s ex-girlfriend is a wisecracking Harvard grad named Julie (referred to by Asher as Julie G-Spot), who is currently slumming as a bartender at a New York strip club. Their affair had “fallen like a dead cat thrown from an apartment building.” Thanks to Julie’s drug-dealing boss Glen—“practically a midget”—unloading smuggled heroin in New York looks like a piece of cake. Like several of the female characters in Bingham’s much-admired 1997 short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value, Julie is a ballbuster with a deadly wit. (When a subsequent lover tosses his spent condom against a hotel room wall, where it sticks with a thud, Julie chimes: “The spaghetti is ready.”)
The novel is less successful with the knuckleheaded slapstick between the double-crossing Glen and his gun-toting black sidekick, Dwayne. Bingham seems to be straining at times for Elmore Leonard’s unique brand of quirky tough-guy comedy, but he doesn’t have Leonard’s ear for lowlife dialogue or the ability to bring something fresh to characters who are little more than stereotypical hoods.
Bingham’s most effective literary milieu, portrayed with frightening immediacy in Pure Slaughter Value, is the crumbled Camelot of East Coast blue bloods and trust fund yuppies. It’s no secret that he knew this world intimately as the heir to a Kentucky newspaper fortune. His own trust fund wealth was such that Bingham never had to work a day in his life. This reality appears to have bred within him—and his characters—a curious mixture of arrogance, self-loathing, substance abuse, and, on occasion, a willful drive for genuine achievement. The strongest sections of Lightning on the Sun are incidental to the novel’s unremarkable story line, but they return Bingham to the corrosive landscape of his short stories.
October 9, 2023
This is a 4 star novel that I nearly gave 5 stars because it was such a joy to read. Ultimately, that final star somehow slipped away, but nevertheless, Lightning on the sun is a treat.
Set in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, in New York and in some Massachusetts college town, the novel contains elements of a crime thriller, local – and shady – politics, and some travel writing (but not the kind you find in a glossy tourist brochure). We follow the adventures of Asher, a thirty-something American with a broken heart, down on his luck in this steamy metropole in the Far East, where the shadows of Khmer Rouge are never absent. After bad luck gets him in financial problems, Asher comes up with a ramshackle plan to get him out of his private cul-de-sac. However, the drug-deal that is supposed to get him home-free goes belly-up, and does so in a wonderful, twisted manner.
Switch to the United States, where we meet a cast of colorful characters, all stumbling around the possession of some high quality heroin and all somehow trying to come up alive. Here’s where the plot thickens and accelerates as well, turning unexpected corners with seven-league boots. To me, this part was the best: solid writing with tension and humor. The grand finale takes place in Cambodia, once again, and is surprising as well.
Sum total: a great, atmospheric adventure story with convincing characters who really grow, and a plot Elmore Leonard would have loved. To me, it felt as if the writing became better and better as well, as Bingham more and more got into this story, his – debut – novel. Sadly, it would turn out to be his last book – at age 33, he died of a heroin overdose.
Set in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, in New York and in some Massachusetts college town, the novel contains elements of a crime thriller, local – and shady – politics, and some travel writing (but not the kind you find in a glossy tourist brochure). We follow the adventures of Asher, a thirty-something American with a broken heart, down on his luck in this steamy metropole in the Far East, where the shadows of Khmer Rouge are never absent. After bad luck gets him in financial problems, Asher comes up with a ramshackle plan to get him out of his private cul-de-sac. However, the drug-deal that is supposed to get him home-free goes belly-up, and does so in a wonderful, twisted manner.
Switch to the United States, where we meet a cast of colorful characters, all stumbling around the possession of some high quality heroin and all somehow trying to come up alive. Here’s where the plot thickens and accelerates as well, turning unexpected corners with seven-league boots. To me, this part was the best: solid writing with tension and humor. The grand finale takes place in Cambodia, once again, and is surprising as well.
Sum total: a great, atmospheric adventure story with convincing characters who really grow, and a plot Elmore Leonard would have loved. To me, it felt as if the writing became better and better as well, as Bingham more and more got into this story, his – debut – novel. Sadly, it would turn out to be his last book – at age 33, he died of a heroin overdose.
July 8, 2008
he always chased adventure and the high, which killed him in the end as he died of a drug overdose in NYC. fantastic writer, it's a shame he didn't live long enough to contribute more.
August 23, 2023
Note: this gets bumped up from 3 to 4 stars for its "exotic" setting: Cambodia. I visited that country as young teenager in 2008. Judging from the descriptions of this novel, I wonder whether my parents really did enough research regarding outbreaks of violence.
Show, don't tell. That's what my creative writing teachers hammered into my head. Not often am I bothered by telling instead of showing, but in this novel, the characters all possess some magical charisma that is almost never expressed in quirky dialog or inventive actions. All the women (all large breasted) like Asher, the protagonist, but you don't really find out what's so special about him. From what you gather about him, he's a burned-out drug addict hanging out in Phnom Penh, driving around on his cool motorcycle.
I was very disappointed with the ending. Julie, Asher's ex-girlfriend, even asks "what the hippie scene is like down at the beach". But no, there's a bombing and kidnapping instead, but I stopped caring. How pleasant would the beach have been, with them just hanging out and finally talking to each other. I guess that's the problem I have with this book. There is not enough genuine talk, either internally or between characters.
It's clearly inspired by Dog Soldiers: A National Book Award Winner, in which a heroin package is also shipped to the U.S. from Southeast Asia, but in that favorite book of mine there is a very healthy dose of Zen, bygone hippie utopia and existentialism that is completely lacking here.
Show, don't tell. That's what my creative writing teachers hammered into my head. Not often am I bothered by telling instead of showing, but in this novel, the characters all possess some magical charisma that is almost never expressed in quirky dialog or inventive actions. All the women (all large breasted) like Asher, the protagonist, but you don't really find out what's so special about him. From what you gather about him, he's a burned-out drug addict hanging out in Phnom Penh, driving around on his cool motorcycle.
I was very disappointed with the ending. Julie, Asher's ex-girlfriend, even asks "what the hippie scene is like down at the beach". But no, there's a bombing and kidnapping instead, but I stopped caring. How pleasant would the beach have been, with them just hanging out and finally talking to each other. I guess that's the problem I have with this book. There is not enough genuine talk, either internally or between characters.
It's clearly inspired by Dog Soldiers: A National Book Award Winner, in which a heroin package is also shipped to the U.S. from Southeast Asia, but in that favorite book of mine there is a very healthy dose of Zen, bygone hippie utopia and existentialism that is completely lacking here.
did-not-finish
January 29, 2023DNF - page 12 (4%)
I don't.... When your novel starts out with your protagonist stalking a woman with binoculars, talking about her body while not knowing her name, somehow I don't think I'm going to like the book.
I don't.... When your novel starts out with your protagonist stalking a woman with binoculars, talking about her body while not knowing her name, somehow I don't think I'm going to like the book.
March 17, 2023
Though I’m a sucker when any blurb or jacket copy mentions Graham Greene, the comparisons often fall short. Published posthumously, the novel should have been the first in many tales Bingham would weave.
September 24, 2023
A skilled, energetic pen captures Phnom Penh.
And the chaos of shady deals unraveling across Cambodia and New York.
Bingham was a talented, possible young successor to Graham Greene, cut down in his prime.
And the chaos of shady deals unraveling across Cambodia and New York.
Bingham was a talented, possible young successor to Graham Greene, cut down in his prime.
February 8, 2021
I read this book as an expat commuting to and from work. It really stressed me out and I found myself anxious to read it. I can’t say I enjoyed it a ton but I thought it was really well written.
February 16, 2021
I feel like I enjoyed this book more than I should have. The writing falls a bit shot and the story is nothing amazing but the characters hold it together for me.
May 14, 2021
Just could not get into this. The story could have been interesting, but the writing was pretentious and tried too hard.
November 14, 2021
If I was to say there is a masterpiece of a book...I would say this ..is it...
December 16, 2021
Sad that Bingham died so young. I’ve read both books he published and would’ve liked to read more.
August 29, 2013
After thirteen years, this novel still resonates with me. It's so shitty that Bingham died of a drug overdose just before this, his first novel, was released. (His short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value, is also great.) It's telling that he tips his hat to Graham Greene in the opening pages - his style is similarly cinematic. But where Greene immersed himself in the shady underworld of international relations, Bingham paints pictures of the upper-middle-class lost in their own banality - as they should be. Asher in Cambodia, scrubbing bat shit off of monuments, trying to orchestrate a lucrative drug heist; his girlfriend Karen in New York, trying to complete the final sale of the stash. It's been this long, but I can still recall numerous moments from this novel, in vivid fashion. Mind you, it might be because I have a cinematic mind, and in those heady days had designs to adapt this novel into a film. But I stand by this one. Bingham's work is hard to come by. If you do, try it out. It may not be for everyone, but they're nice and short/tight.
October 27, 2007
'The same tide that had swept her out to sea had pulled her back in again.'
'This sordid conversation, this wonderful girl, the jet lag and the bourbon, they all coalesced into a dreamy concoction he hoped would not curdle.'
'It had effortlessly swum up through the swampy depths of a strange lake of love, broken the surface and was breathing again.'
'It was toxic and transcontinental, a soupy, sick mist that had crossed the world to envelop his beat.'
'The sky was black and the sky was blue. The two colors had slept together.'
'But for Julie, time was smoking and cigarettes a great friend.'
'This sordid conversation, this wonderful girl, the jet lag and the bourbon, they all coalesced into a dreamy concoction he hoped would not curdle.'
'It had effortlessly swum up through the swampy depths of a strange lake of love, broken the surface and was breathing again.'
'It was toxic and transcontinental, a soupy, sick mist that had crossed the world to envelop his beat.'
'The sky was black and the sky was blue. The two colors had slept together.'
'But for Julie, time was smoking and cigarettes a great friend.'
March 20, 2013
First and only novel by a writer who died of a heroin overdose 6 months before this book was published. Set in Cambodia it depicts an American journalist infactuation with danger and the exotic. It is not just autobiographical but it is also a tragic tale about America's naive involvement and the bitter consequences of the South East Asian wars. A great book!
January 13, 2008
A great story of expatriate dissolution in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. After I read it, it was only a matter of time till I made my way to that city. And it was everything I'd expected. (Much better than touristy, ersatz Siem Reap.)
January 13, 2011
I wanted to like this book more; and I really tried to, but in the end its a really ordinary down and out expat drug story; nothing wrong with that, but, save a few passages, the writing just wasn't there
December 12, 2012
Beautifully Written, HOWEVER, unless you KNOW the Dragon, It would be difficult at best & boring as hell (excluding blazing similes & kick-ass metaphors ) at worst.
Oh its a great read though
Robert Bingham did indeed die of a heroin Overdose withn weeks after writing this book.
Oh its a great read though
Robert Bingham did indeed die of a heroin Overdose withn weeks after writing this book.
October 20, 2007
I don't really remember this book. I just remember how briskly it moved. I really liked it.
April 29, 2010
A young man in Cambodia, a displaced U.N. employee, gets involved in the drug trade. Did not like the author's style. He tries to be whimsical, comes off as flippant, arrogant & shallow.
Read
May 27, 2010fantastic.
January 1, 2012
A thriller about a rock climber and a washed up FBI agent.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews