Copyright

First Houghton Mifflin Harcourt edition 2013

Copyright © 1991 by Margaret Drabble

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

First U.S. edition published in 1992 by Viking
Originally published in Great Britain in 1991 by Penguin UK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

eISBN 978-0-544-28690-0
v1.1013

Dedication

For Joe Swift

For Chhiek Ieng That

For all those on the border

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all those who helped me with the background material for this book. I hope they will not disapprove of the fictional use to which I have put their facts. It is not possible to name them all, but I would like to give particular thanks to Susan Balfour, Anthony Barnett, Elizabeth Becker, Jack Emery, Rosalind Finlay, Stanley and Romaly Harper, Tony Jackson, Judith Jacob, Mary Kay Magistad, Amanda Milligan, Chris Mullin, Minh Phuoc, William Shawcross, Nicki Sissons, M. R. Smansnid Svasti, Chhiek Ieng That, and the Manager of the Oriental Hotel.

Epigraph

Dreams, said Penelope to the stranger, may puzzle and mislead. They do not always foretell the truth. They come to us through two gates: one is of horn, the other is of ivory. The dreams that come to us through the traitor ivory deceive us with false images of what will never come to pass: but those that appear to us through the polished horn speak plainly of what could be and will be.

Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIX, 560–65

The Gates of Ivory

This is a novel—if novel it be—about Good Time and Bad Time. Imagine yourself standing by a bridge over a river on the border between Thailand and Cambodia. Behind you, the little town of Aranyaprathet, bristling with aerials and stuffed with Good Time merchandise, connected by road and rail and telephone and post office and gossip and newspapers and banking systems with all the Good Times of the West. Before you, the Bad Time of Cambodia. You can peer into the sunlit darkness if you wish.