The Truth About Polenta

Oh dear! Did Rushdie get the truth about polenta glaringly wrong in The Enchantress of Florence? Just shows how carefully you have to check your facts when you write a novel, and how you will be found out (even on the most obscure points) if you don't.

And talking of Rushdie, his piece on India's transexuals in the Times (which I should have linked too earlier) is well worth a read.

Licence to Spin?

Thor Kah Hong's column in yesterday's Star interested me. It's about time someone wrote about Peter Ho Davies in the local papers! He's a superb short story writer for a start. He was acknowledged by Granta magazine as one of the best young British novelists in 2003. His work appeared in the 1995, 1996 and 2001 editions of Best American Short Stories and the 1998 O. Henry Awards. And he has a strong Malaysian connection - his mother is Malaysian-Chinese, and apparently Ho Davies also worked here.

I bought his collection of The Ugliest House in the World (which won PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) when it first hit the bookshops. There was the immediate rush of pleasure at discovering it contained a couple of stories set in Malaysia. And I enjoyed the whole collection very much indeed. In the beautifully surreal Buoyancy, a boy remembers his grandfather who drowned himself in the water jar in the back garden. And then there's the last story in the collection The Silver Screen, set in Brickfields during The Emergency.

This is what Thor had to say about it:

"The last story, The Silver Screen, (first published in Harvard Review and The Best American Short Stories 1996) was the one that gave me a few problems in the reading.

It raised all kinds of thoughts and questions about the imagination and creative licence. In the preceding page of “Acknowledgments”, Ho Davies credits Noel Barber’s The War of the Running Dogs as a particularly valuable source of historical information and notes: “Any inaccuracies are my responsibility, as, of course, are the occasional historical liberties I’ve taken.”

Log on to the website www.contemporarywriters.com set up by The British Council, and in the essay/comment on Peter Ho Davies, one is told that here is a writer who is “completely convincing” with “an exhilarating and vivid attention to detail”.

Therein lies my problem. In The Silver Screen he is not “convincing” because the “historical liberties” were more than “occasional”. I couldn’t have a smooth read because I kept stopping in irritation every time I came across inaccurate or risible details of a country, a neighbourhood, a time I lived through/in.

Starting with the first paragraph:

“From the end of the Second World War until the outbreak of the insurgency in 1948, the fourteenth Kuala Lumpur branch of the Malayan Communist party held its meetings at the Savoy Cinema on Brickfields Street.”

(I’d better establish my credentials. The first 23 years of my life were spent in Brickfields, 1950-1973. I have written, had published, and have performed on various stages several pieces entitled Brickfields Now and Then about growing up in Malaya in the 1950s.)

Brickfields Road instead of Street, the Lido cinema instead of the Savoy. Just names. I had no problem with that. And fiction can accommodate “the fourteenth KL branch of the Communist Party”.

My uneasiness first surfaced when I read that the “Savoy was an open-air cinema – four high walls with no roof and a huge canvas screen stretched out against the night sky.” Such alfresco entertainment was available in many parts of the country during that time, but the Lido had a roof and “first-class” seats upstairs. Inadequate research or someone patronising quaint primitives for foreign readers?

I’ll resist listing all the nits I picked out, just a couple of the more obvious howlers that stood out. In a propaganda leaflet dropped into the jungle to tempt the starving commies to surrender there is a photograph showing “dishes of chicken’s feet, fish-head curry, clay-pot bean-curd, prawns with asparagus, char-siu pork, and lemon chicken”.

Ho Davies may have tucked into this feast in some Chinese restaurant in Britain or when he was working in Malaysia and Singapore, but in Malaya in the 1950s? Asparagus? Ha! Chicken’s feet? Yeah, everybody knows the Chinese will eat anything. Fish-head curry and lemon chicken?

And it must have seemed reasonable for Ho Davies to have two of his characters, with practically no food and no equipment other than a rifle, wander in the jungle for almost two weeks and find themselves 200 miles from where they started.

Anyone who has ventured into the Malaysian jungle will know what an awesome feat that is. Excuse me, Mr Ho Davies, this is not Sherwood Forest.

Am I being unfair? Not seeing the forest for the trees? What about the story? The colourful characters? The prizes and the glowing endorsement by writers such as Gish Jen and Lee Chang-rae (whose works I enjoy reading)?

This is one time I feel the owning up to creative liberties and the possibility of inaccuracies does not absolve the writer of the charge of mining a vein of exotic sensations."

I hadn't noticed the factual errors in this story myself, but bow to Thor's knowledge of Brickfields and the '50's.

But I think the point that Thor is making here is an extremely important one. No matter how good the writing, the credibility of a story is destroyed whenever readers spot errors of fact.

Fiction is fiction is fiction, and writers will invent characters and places and events. That's fine. Every reader will respect that.

BUT, once you begin to draw on the "real world" a writer owes it his readers to get the details (historical, sociological, geographical, numismatic, ornithological - whatever!) right. (I've discussed this issue before, still feel strongly about it.)

I think it's laziness not to do so!

Ian McEwan Hints at a Coming Novel

Article about Ian McEwan from The New York Times. Have read most of his books - enjoy his darkness, the sense of terror just under the surface of everyday life. My favourites are "A Child in Time" (the ultimate horror - a child disappears in a supermarket and is not found again) and his early work "The Cement Garden". "Enduring Love" has one of the most dramatic and terrifying openings of any novel - I had to reread it several times before I could move on to the rest of the story, but the rest of the book doesn't match its intensity at all - and from the reviews I've read, this could also be a problem with the film. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

The New York Times > Books > Ian McEwan Hints at a Coming Novel

Intersted in this piece on the whole question of factual accuracy which McEwan mentions:

Asked about his job, he said he was a novelist. "What kind of novels do you write, fact or fiction?" his questioner inquired.

The point was not just to poke fun at his interrogator. Rather, it led to a lengthy explanation of his belief in factual accuracy to underpin and nourish the novelist's imagination. Indeed, he said, as a schoolboy of 13 he had discovered that a description of a Punch magazine cover in L. P. Hartley's 1953 novel "The Go-Between" was in fact completely accurate. "If there was a moment when I decided to become a writer, that was it," he said.

I believe that writers should go to such lengths or credibility is destroyed. I remember one online writing buddy telling me that she was unable to go on reading a book by John Grisham after she read that the main character went into a bakery she knows well (the place was named) and bought a bagel. "It doesn't sell bagels!" she said, annoyed that the writer had failed to check out an easily verifiable fact.

Margaret Atwood went so far as to take a tape measurement to the bridge mentioned at the beginning of "The Blind Assassin" so that she could work out exactly how many times the car rolled when it fell from the bridge ...

Reply To Susan Abrahams

Oh dear. My graceless reply to Susan Abrahams re. The Rice Mother provoked a great long angry reply posted on an e-group (which has bumped me off to boot and I don't really blame them) and another great deluge of justification via the same e-group of why the Rani Manicka is the best thing since sliced bread (or should that be "roti canai"?). Susan lists all the conferences Rani's been invited to, the translations, the piles of books in shops everywhere, the fact that it is sold at airports. Pretty impressive stuff. I don't knock commercial success and I'm glad that a Malaysian is commercially successful at writing, just as I'm glad that Jimmy Choo makes shoes in London, and Michelle Yeo king-fu's her way into Hollywood films. (I actually do identify with Malaysia more strongly than my own country for all that Susan finds my attitude "colonial" - I've lived here nesrly half a lifetime.

Okay, it's a popular novel that should be viewed as such, and the application of any kind of literary yardstick to the book is superfluous.

But I read critically. Can't help it. I don't read to tear apart. In this case I was actually gung-ho about supporting a Malaysian writer - and then greatly disappointed when the book didn't measure up. And absolutely open mouthed that a book so flawed and so poorly edited should garner such praise.

I was gobsmacked by the obvious inaccuracies in the book, galring evn to this Mat salleh who never formallys tudied Malaysian history. Perhaps someone reading this would like to tell me if I'm right or not.

In Chapter 1, the journey from Penang to Kuantan (in 1930) by road is surprisingly fast. Lakshmi and her husband arrive after daybreak and reach Kuantan before darkness falls on the same day and Lakshmi has time to clean up her new house before dark. (I believe that the journey from Temerloh to Kuantan used to take a whole day even in the 1950's - maybe someone can enlighten me?)

Strangely enough Lakshmi seems to notice nothing about the journey but some dulang washers along the road and a Chinese woman with bound feet selling eggs by the roadside. (I thought only very upper class Chinese women would have their feet bound ... certainly not itinerant egg-sellers)

P31 "In a daze I handed over the twenty ringgit note ..." (This is in 1930. I thought the unit of currency was the Straits Dollar?)

The salary for a clerk in 1930 is quoted as 220 ringgit (still ringgit!) per month. (I don't know if this is right or not but it sounds a lot.)

P26 Writing about a wooden bench: "Not knowing that that piece of furniture would survive me ..." (How can a person know the fate of a piece of furniture after their death???? Is she writing this in her afterlife? Why on earth didn't an editor spot this???)

P27 She hears "... a lemur scratching in the rambutan tree". (Malaysia doesn't have lemurs at all. They are native only to Madagascar. She might mean a culogo, but they would not be found in rambutan trees. Also, it begs the question, how did she know from the sound of scratching alone that it was this particular animal? Particularly as she is new to the country?) Later on there is a reference to swimming monkeys, a species I haven't come across despite being an ardent nature lover and long-time member of MNS - though there are fishing monkeys off PD but they don't actually swim.

P40 About the durian "I loved even its astonishingly unique smell that I am told prompted an English novelist to describe it eating a sweet raspberry blancmange in a lavatory." (For me this begs several questions. first, is Lakshmi the kind of character who would read a novel let at alone one published in English and not translated - she is uneducated and doesn't, as far as I can remember, speak any English. Would a woman like this be at all bothered what a novelist says? Secondly, how would she have a clue what a blancmange was or what a raspberry tasted like? The quote is from Anthony Burgess in the first part of "The Malayan Trilogy" (1956). So the earliest she would have heard the quote would have been 26 years or so after she ate that durian! Just wonder how she or the folks she chatted about durians to, got hold of a copy?

p122 "Weeks before the Japanese invaded Malaysia .." (Classic!!!)

p206 "two boys played conkers" Conkers are the fruit of the horse chestnut tree, not found here. (Does she mean congkat?)

Okay, okay, I stop there. A certain amount of artistic license is permissable. Writers are free to create their own realities. But I find such glaring actual inaccuracies insulting to readers and the mark of extremely poor editing. An overseas reader wouldn't notice these things, but I know Malaysians would. Who is the book aimed at?

There's more I could say about the book, but for the moment won't because it would mean actually rereading chunks of the book. Might take the task on later and construct an academic paper. Do I feel a PhD coming on???