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The Ballad of a Small Player (2014)

par Lawrence Osborne

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13719198,151 (3.54)3
As night falls on Macau and the neon signs that line the rain-slick streets come alive, Doyle - "Lord Doyle" to his fellow players - descends into his casino of choice to try his luck at the baccarat tables that are the anchor of his current existence. A corrupt English lawyer who has escaped prosecution by fleeing to the East, Doyle spends his nights drinking and gambling and his days sleeping off his excesses, continually haunted by his past. Taking refuge in a series of louche and dimly lit hotels, he watches his fortune rise and fall as the cards decide his fate. In a moment of crisis he meets Dao-Ming, an enigmatic Chinese woman who appears to be a denizen of the casinos just like himself, and seems to offer him salvation in the form of both money and love. But as Doyle attempts to make a rare and true connection, all that he accepts as reality seems to be slipping from his grasp.… (plus d'informations)
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The Ballad Of A Small Player (2014) by Lawrence Osborne.
THE BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER is the tale of a small man who, through theft back home in England, now haunts the gambling casinos of Macau and Hong Kong. He knows of the spiral he is living on, he knows of the inevitability of his luck, but he is composed to let it run it’s course and for the bottom to drop out of his life. But when it does, when he has nothing left and is beyond redemption, he is saved from his fate by Dao-Ming, the hooker with a heart of gold. She whisks him away from the casinos and gently helps him to recover, but they both know he will return to the tables.
One morning she is gone from the small house they share and he leaves, stealing her money, and of course he drifts back to the baccarat tables, but now his luck has turned. Now he wins. And wins.
The management talks to him, explaining that some suspect he has a ghost behind him, but he feels nothing. Days pass and he drifts slowly casino to casino, feeling less and less, eating endlessly, sporadically wagering, always winning until he is so far removed from reality he feels there is nothing left but to find the girl again and change his life.
Lawrence Osborne has written a small book with lavish details of the Orient set in place that brings out the essence of the place in full bloom. The lead character is fully realized to the extent that is needed but there is no sympathy that this reader can feel for this despicable person. He has thrown away every for the gamble and when even that loses its appeal, he throws away what is left.
A sad ghost story won through Goodreads. ( )
  TomDonaghey | Dec 2, 2022 |
The Ballad of a Small Player (2014) is a novel of contemporary western China, in Macau’s gilded gambling casinos. “Lord” Doyle is an expatriate barrister from London. Doyle thinks of himself as a long term loser personality and an obsessive gambler against luck. The ironic title of Lord has been given to Doyle by the Chinese hotel and casinos staff because of his good suits, yellow gambling gloves, and “quai lo” (Caucasian) airs of royalty he maintains while losing more money than he wins. Wealth that Doyle embezzled and absconded with from London gives him immunity from overt scorn by the Chinese gamblers and staff. Doyle’s self-hatred is mitigated by his identification with Taoists’ concept of “preta” described in English as “Hungry Ghosts.” These poor souls are awaiting reincarnation to a better life existing indefinitely in the equivalent of Christian hell. The hungry ghosts are burdened by a tremendous appetite for food, drink, and other sensory pleasures that cannot be satisfied except during the seventh lunar month of the Chinese calendar. Doyle sees himself as a denizen of the casinos in his seventh month.

The novel is an interesting character study and maintains a consistently gloomy mood against a background of huge glitzy rooms. The depressive views of Doyle are symptomatic of what we call gambling “addiction” in the West. In the East, however, the Chinese call the predictable addictive behavior “luck,” that Doyle associates with the I Ching. Caught between two cultural views, Doyle plays a type of Baccarat that involves no player skill, only a turning of the cards and counting numbers. He casts his fate to the wind every night expecting to lose with no basis for his anticipation. Seeing himself as a loser, Doyle claims that once a loser always one. As an addict, Doyle is a hungry ghost who has selected specific self-destructive behaviors because of his immutable loser personality. Instead of the Western explanation that an addiction overcomes one, the Eastern description is that all past and present living factors (including guilt) have influenced one to pick his individual unreachable “pleasure.”

This is the second good novel of the Orient by Lawrence Osborne I have read. Hunters in the Dark will be published in January 2016. I give this novel my highest rating ( )
  GarySeverance | Nov 20, 2015 |
Lord Doyle is a gambler, a big gambler.He is a former lawyer with an unsavory past who has reinvented himself in Macau as a kid glove wearing "white ghost". This story is about money and morality and it is very sly. So sly in fact that if you blink you might miss it. Lawrence Osbourne introduces some artfully memorable characters in the form of Grandma, an older gambling, wronged wife who prefers to lose and Dao-Ling, an enigmatic, spiritual country call girl. Osbourne weaves Doyle's desperation and decadence in with the mysticism of the east and you can't help but find yourself rooting for him at the tables, rooting for his very soul. This is a story that clicks at the end and you find yourself wanting to turn back to the first page. "At midnight on Mondays,..." Just don't blink.

Provided by publisher ( )
  hfineisen | Mar 6, 2015 |
Cette critique a été écrite dans le cadre des Critiques en avant-première de LibraryThing.
“Lord” Doyle is an English lawyer who steals his elderly clients money and runs away to Macau to gamble obsessively, winning some and losing some.
I found the descriptions of Macau, China and the gambling casinos to be very interesting, but had problems understanding the obsession of gambling and could not develop much sympathy for the main character and the other gamblers. The lifestyle seemed pointless and the story was depressing! ( )
  patmil | May 17, 2014 |
The Ballad of a Small Player
By Lawrence Osborne
Hogarth, 257 pgs
978-0-8041-3797-3
Submitted by the publisher
Rating: 4 of 5

Be careful what you wish for, for you may get it.

“Lord Doyle” (the Chinese may not know who he really is but he is under no illusions) is a British lawyer, dissolute gambler and fugitive from the law. Having fled Sussex a decade ago, he has adopted Macau, China as his playpen and money as his preferred toy. Also hookers. He is holed up in the Hotel Lisboa, reputed to be the world’s largest casino, with revenue of $7m a day. Doyle haunts the VIP rooms, minimum bet $10k, maximum $2m. He is not the only thing haunting those rooms.

In Lawrence Osborne's The Ballad of a Small Player, our hero is an addict, no doubt about it. Doyle’s hands sweat and his mouth goes dry; he feels dizzy; he feels like a “shaman.” This is dopamine flooding the system, folks. And guess what? It doesn’t really matter if he loses. He needs to lose as well as he needs to win. It’s the roller coaster (the “electric flow of my own irresponsibility”) his brain chemistry has been taught to require. The casino managers and employees revile him, are disgusted by this gwai lo, even as they rely on him and his ilk for their livelihoods. Punto banco baccarat is the drug of choice. I did not know from baccarat (“that slutty dirty queen of casino card games”) so please indulge me as I explain.

PBB is purely a game of chance; there is no skill involved. Each player (punto) is given two cards; add the values of those cards and the highest number wins. Cards two through nine are face value; the ten and the face cards are worth nothing; the ace is valued at one. If your score is higher than ten then you subtract ten (a modulo ten). If your two cards total less than five then you can request a third card. For example: the banco deals and your cards are a four and a 7; your score is one modulo ten because 4+7=11, which is greater than ten, so you subtract ten. The highest possible score in PBB is nine, a “natural.” Page 46:

“Punto banco baccarat is a struggle with the pure laws of chance. When you play it you are alone with your fate, and one is not often alone with one’s fate. When you play it your heart is in your mouth. Your pulse quickens to an unbearable pace. You feel that you are walking along the edge of the volcanic precipice made of sharp, hot rock cut as fine as a razor and capable of breaking with all the drama of glass. It is a game surrounded by threatening possibilities: instant death, which comes even quicker than it does with poker or roulette. That’s what I like about it. There’s no lingering illusion. Death by guillotine.”

Our story opens as Doyle loses yet again and allows himself to be picked up by a young woman at the baccarat table, Dao-Ming. She is lovely and a tad shy, not long out of her village. They share the night and Doyle finds himself rather touched by her simple ways, affected as he no longer thought possible. She feels the same way about him. He is supposed to call. Surprise! He doesn’t call. Instead he returns to the tables and manages to lose his last two chips. The Lord, intermittently suicidal, is sitting at the Hotel Intercontinental in Kowloon indulging in his last meal, which he cannot pay for, when a woman sits down at the table with him. It is a sophisticated, stylishly dressed and well-spoken Dao-Ming. She rescues him: pays his bill and spirits him away to her home at the top of a hill on Lamma. She nurses him and feeds him and restores him. Once restored our Lord Doyle, inescapably, begins to itch for the baccarat tables. So Dao-Ming makes his return possible and then disappears. Doyle embarks upon the longest, grandest most ridiculous winning streak anyone anywhere has ever seen. We’re talking millions. But guess what? It’s not enough. It’s not the point. The point is the roller coaster. And you can’t have a roller coaster if you never plunge. Page 228:

“Take the example of tossing coins. The outcomes of each toss of a coin are statistically independent and the chances of getting heads, for example, on each toss is always ½. The probability of getting two heads in two tosses is ¼, and so on. If a player tossed five heads in a row, the probability of which is only 1/32, the other player might assume, according to the fallacy, that a tails is “due” pretty soon. This is incorrect. The probability of flipping twenty-one heads in a row is, in fact, 1 in 2,097,152, but the probability of flipping a head having already flipped twenty times is, surprise surprise, still only ½.”

Lawrence Osborne has invented an original and intriguing character in the other-worldly Dao-Ming. She is a master blend of contradictions as she simultaneously offers up her physical self and slams down tight the grille barring her authentic ego. Lord Doyle, on the other hand, is not unique; no, he is all too common. Doyle is a sad case, pitiable, even tragic, and sometimes deranged, but he is never laughable. This is one of the myriad instances in which this author proves his skill: I cared about Doyle, even in his most abased moments when his addiction has him on the mat; even as he finally went about strategically, deliberately ruining himself. He believes that in his ruination what he truly needs will come back to him.

Lawrence Osborne is not just a master at creating complicated human beings, he also excels at immersing you in his environment. Osborne paints Macau and Hong Kong alive with his prose. You can hear the strident mobs in the pits; taste the oolong tea; see the garish pseudo-Roman circus décor of the casinos; smell the stench of the ubiquitous clouds of cheap cigarette smoke; feel the rain soaking your hair as you take the ferry to Hong Kong – it is monsoon season in the South China Sea. But here in the land of the I Ching there is also a sixth sense.

Are you superstitious? No? Are you sure? ( )
  TexasBookLover | Mar 30, 2014 |
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At midnight on Mondays, or a little after, I arrive at the Greek Mythology in Taipa, where I play on those nights when I have nowhere else to do, when I am tired of Fernando's and the Clube Militar and the little brothel hotels on Republica. I like it there because there are no Chinese TV stars and because they know me. -Chapter 1
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As night falls on Macau and the neon signs that line the rain-slick streets come alive, Doyle - "Lord Doyle" to his fellow players - descends into his casino of choice to try his luck at the baccarat tables that are the anchor of his current existence. A corrupt English lawyer who has escaped prosecution by fleeing to the East, Doyle spends his nights drinking and gambling and his days sleeping off his excesses, continually haunted by his past. Taking refuge in a series of louche and dimly lit hotels, he watches his fortune rise and fall as the cards decide his fate. In a moment of crisis he meets Dao-Ming, an enigmatic Chinese woman who appears to be a denizen of the casinos just like himself, and seems to offer him salvation in the form of both money and love. But as Doyle attempts to make a rare and true connection, all that he accepts as reality seems to be slipping from his grasp.

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