Pure by Timothy Mo: review You should never judge a book by its disclaimer. Readers of Timothy Mo's startling, typically eccentric Pure may be forgiven for putting it down unread when confronted by its first page: "this fiction is a distillation. About places and personages, dates and dialects, its principals have not always been exigent. None have any but an ideal existence in their own lucubrations. It is hard to say quite how Pure is a distillation (or a lucubration, for that matter). It certainly does need some sort of disclaimer, though, as it tells the shocking story of how Snooky, a young Thai katoey (a ladyboy, in the cruel vernacular) becomes first a British-run spy, and then a brutally effective jihadist. Snooky is given the majority of the narration, revelling in her status as a drug-addled, smooth-skinned, fellating bombshell, capriciously drawn towards Muslim extremism. Other narrators are also given idiomatic voices. There is Victor Veridian, the almost-gay Oxford don, who is the spymaster running Snooky. He says fusty things like: "I mounted my chariot of fire and ascended into the empyrean - rather grey over the Home Counties - without excessive trepidation." Or the murderous leader Sheykh, who fits the bill of movie-villain Muslim with remarks like: "I was born of rock and ice but I find myself among a people of sand and mud." All of this sounds rather silly, but that is part of the charm. It is daring, to say the least, for a novelist to consider the question of religious tensions in south-east Asia not in hushed tones, but in something more redolent of the bustling hustle of Thai street culture. And, amid all of the shocks, Mo gives us understated atrocities, like a terrifyingly calm account of waterboarding: "Now I began to drown. Again, this might as well have been in the ocean's profoundest abyss but was not even a fraction of an inch deep. The surrounding irreverence contrasts with such moments of barbarity (on both sides), as the novel refuses to give clear moral guidance about the actions of its characters. Snooky is given a religious epiphany, but is also shown to be hopelessly addicted to opiates when committing her terrorist acts. The novel ends with the proclamation: "I'm pure." The implication is that this could easily be "impure." You cannot judge a book by its title, either. Pure Timothy Mo Turnaround, £16.99, 388pp