The Harmony Silk Factory - Review

My review from Starmag.

“Tropical Asia (is) suddenly the focus of every gaze” wrote critic Boyd Tonkin in The Independent earlier in the year, announcing a spate of first novels by young Asian writers. Neil Mukherjee of The Times meanwhile noted: “India, China and Japan are almost reeling from overexposure in fiction but Malaysia is relatively new to the English reader.” Enter Malaysian writer Tash Aw who scooped one of the year’s most lucrative publishing deals for his ambitious first novel The Harmony Silk Factory, which was published simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic at the beginning of March.

Set in the Kinta Valley of Perak against the backdrop of World War II, the novel charts the rise to power of notorious gangster and communist leader, Johnny Lim. The Harmony Silk Factory of the title is a shophouse which serves as a front for Johnny’s varied criminal activities which include smuggling and black marketeering. Aw’s prose, both elegant and highly readable draws the reader into the story immediately.

“We all know that the retelling of history cannot be perfect” says Johnny’s son Jasper, and the plot unfolds through a clever triangulation of viewpoints, forcing the reader to constantly reappraise each narrator’s account of events at every turn.

Jasper, now in his forties, narrates his father’s early history with information gleaned from libraries and newspaper archives as well as from scraps of memory and visits to some of the locales of Johnny’s story. He draws the landscape, both social and physical, of the Kinta valley: creating a slightly romanticized world of misty jungles, cave temples, hidden coves and mysterious islands.

Johnny is the son of South Chinese immigrants and makes a name for himself by inventing “the amazing toddy machine”. With the slump in rubber prices in the 1930’s, Johnny goes to work as an indentured labourer in a British-owned tin mine. After he stabs one of the British mine managers with a screwdriver, Johnny is forced to move from town to town as an itinerate worker, teaming up with communist sympathizers on the way. In Kampar he ends up working for local businessman and communist leader, Tiger Tan in his fabric business and commences his ruthless rise to power.

These opening chapters of the book are a delight, as Jasper lays before us the nature of Johnny’s many betrayals and machinations. But although this narrator promises the reader “a clear and complete picture of the events following my father’s terrible past”, he is unable to keep his word because important pieces of the puzzle remain in the hands of other witnesses to Johnny’s life.

A diary kept by Johnny’s beautiful wife Snow in 1941 forms the central section of the novel. She narrates the story of the journey she makes with Johnny to a nearby chain of islands called The Seven Maidens, ostensibly as a belated honeymoon trip. They are accompanied by the repulsive Frederick Honey, a British mine owner with strong views of colonialism; Mamoru Kunichika, a Japanese professor (soon to become leader of the Japanese secret police and infamous for the atrocities he commits); and Peter Wormwood, Johnny’s rather camp and aesthetic British friend. They make an unlikely party, and Snow describes the journey in an almost surreal, dreamlike way: people and landmarks along the way appear and disappear as if they are mere illusions. Unfortunately, the novel looses pace and impetus during Snow’s narrative and the events described as they sail out to the legendary islands seem more than a little melodramatic.

Peter Wormwood offers his own account of the trip in the book’s third section. Now an old man in a nursing home in Malacca, he alternatively talks about the garden he is planning to build and dips into the past to reminisce about his first meetings with Johnny and Snow. As he offers his own version of the fateful trip to the Seven Maidens we gradually understand the real purpose of the journey and the nature of the devil’s bargain that Johnny is forced to make.

Aw’s demonstrates how each narrator sees a different version of the truth through the prism of their own prejudices and preconceptions. To his credit Aw manages to keep some clever plot twists till the end. Yet for all his deft handling of his material, lose ends there are a-plenty, and the novel ultimately fails to satisfy because the reader never truly gets a handle on the key relationships. The character at the novel’s heart, Johnny Lim, remains shadowy and unconvincing, and much as we might sympathise with Snow, trapped in a loveless marriage, she never fully comes alive for us.

Jasper is perhaps the character the reader can identify with most readily, as he struggles to come to terms with his father’s past. It’s a great pity that Aw does not allow him to revisit it with fresh insight once he has all the strands of the story in his hand.