The Ballad of a Small Player

Starred review from February 3, 2014
The latest from author and journalist Osborne (The Forgiven) is a searing portrait of addiction and despair set in the glittering world of Macau’s casinos. “Lord Doyle,” as he’s known to the other gamblers, is an English lawyer who has embezzled from a client and fled to Asia. Doyle spends his days and nights playing baccarat, which he calls “a game of ecstasy and doom.” At the tables he drinks fine wine, handles his cards wearing kid gloves, and slowly but surely loses. Doyle’s descriptions of the tables, the players, and the game’s siren allure are by turns touching, acid, and depressing. A fellow gamer has eyes that reveal “worlds of private pain.” A particularly garish casino inspires Doyle to muse, “There is something in kitsch that reminds you there is more to being alive than being alive.” But Doyle’s jaundiced eye barely masks his monstrous compulsion; indeed, the novel’s energetic portrait of the highs and lows of a gambler’s fortunes are as good as anything in the literature of addiction. Just when it seems Doyle’s luck may have at last run out, he’s rescued by Dao-Ming, a beautiful prostitute, whose genuine concern for him seems to rouse Doyle from his dissipation and downward spiral. But the novel subverts an easy storybook ending and reveals something much bleaker. Osborne’s intriguing Chinese milieu and exquisite prose mark this work as a standout.

February 1, 2014
The titular "small player" of Osborne's (The Forgiven, 2012, etc.) new novel gambles at the casinos in and around Macau--and exclusively plays the high stakes game of baccarat. Doyle, our narrator and frequently known as "Lord Doyle"--especially when he's coming off a winning streak--has attained his money dubiously; he's an English lawyer who embezzled a pile of cash from a vulnerable and trusting older woman. Doyle doesn't dwell on this part of his past, however, instead fixating on the smoky rooms and betting parlors of Macau, where he's surrounded by other equally obsessed gamblers. We meet an intimidating woman known as "Grandma," who every night drops thousands of Hong Kong dollars to get revenge on her philandering husband. Doyle's most important connection is to Dao-Ming, a call girl with a proverbial heart of gold, the only truly human relationship Doyle is able to establish. His preoccupation--and at times his obsession--is the game of baccarat. We learn that each hand is inherently short, and the drama emerges from the enormous sums won and lost on the turn of a card. We witness Doyle's status change radically from loser to winner; since a "natural nine" is the best possible hand in baccarat, Doyle becomes something of a celebrity when he starts putting together hand after hand of these nines--and the proprietors of the casinos develop an understandable interest in this increase in his "luck." With his fortune mounting, Doyle plays one final hand--and decides to bet everything on the outcome. Osborne masterfully recreates the atmosphere of casinos as well as the psychology of baccarat players--and leaves readers eager to try their luck at the game.

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March 1, 2014
Having hastily decamped from the stuffy legal courtrooms of London to the smoky back-alley casinos of Macau, Lord Doyle tries to capitalize on the ill-gotten gains that forced his flight from his homeland by gaming the system at the island's glitzy baccarat tables. His fortunes rise and fall on a whim, the excesses of success mitigated by the depression of defeat. Always one to put on a good show, however, Doyle maintains his aura of invincibility until a local call girl offers him refuge when his money runs out. Robbing her to get enough of a stake on which to make a comeback, Doyle achieves a run of unprecedented good luck, but at what cost? With its ex-pat angst and debauched air of moral ambiguity set amid the sinister demimonde of the Far East's corrupt gambling dens, Osborne's (The Forgiven, 2012) darkly introspective study of decline and decay conjures apt comparisons to Paul Bowles, Graham Greene, and V. S. Naipaul.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2013

Osborne's The Forgiven, an Economist Best Book of the Year (and one of my personal bests from last year, too), is as brilliant, unsentimental a rendering of the contemporary East-West conflict and the imperfect human psyche as you are likely to find. His new work proceeds in that tradition. The ethically challenged English lawyer Doyle has fled to Macau and thence Hong Kong, where he drinks and gambles his life away as he watches his finances sail high and low. A beautiful Chinese woman named Dao-Ming promises both love and money, but will Doyle's shady past smother him first?

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2014

In his newest novel, Osborne (The Forgiven; The Naked Tourist) unpacks Nietzsche's concept of the eternal return through the melancholy figure of Lord Doyle. Hiding out in Hong Kong, finding solace in alcohol, and burning through his embezzled wealth at the baccarat table, the British lawyer is searching through his past and trying to make sense of his present. At the nadir of his gambling addiction, he meets a prostitute who changes his fortune forever. The intersection of statistical probabilities and superstition are invisible forces that provide depth and meaning to both characters as well as a dramatic context to explore fundamental questions of human value. VERDICT Osborne's novel is seemingly a fictional composite of his own interests in drinking, traveling, and Southeast Asia. But the work is more than a personal diversion. It speaks to a larger, more disturbing universal truth embedded in the culture of gambling: one is always forced to act with or against the cards that are dealt. [See Prepub Alert 10/4/13.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.