Learning the Language of the Past

The notebooks excited me because, for all their gaps and mysteries, they recorded, verbatim, conversations around which I could build a story. I’d have to invent the context for the conversations, and I’d have to speculate about the people who spoke the words, and I was uncertain about how appropriate it was to do that. But in the end I felt it was important to try, because this story was one that recorded an aspect of our past—shared between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians—that was hugely important. It records a moment in that shared history where mutual goodwill and generous curiosity created real understanding.

Australian novelist, Kate Grenville (shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize for The Secret River), writes about how the contents of two notebooks brought alive to the friendship between a young lieutenant in a newly formed penal colony at the end of the C18th, and a young aboriginal girl; and how she set about using and this material and fleshing it out with further research. She says:

As a novelist I have latitude to speculate, to add, to omit, to guess and even to invent. But I also have available to me all the richness of the historical record. In a tradition that goes back to Homer and beyond, I’ve taken events that took place in the real world and used them as the basis for a work of imagination.

(You can preview the novel, The Lieutenant on Google Books.)

There are so many more excellent articles for the various editions of Quill magazine posted up on Eric Forbes' blog, so I urge you to go have a read. Quill seems to have evolved over the past couple of years into one of the best literary magazines - anywhere!

Bookies' Book Bags the Booker!

Just for once, the bookies favourite won! Hilary Mantel was awarded the 2009 Man Booker Prize last night for Wolf Hall, which is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell's rise to prominence in the Tudor court.

James Naughtie, chair of judges said :

Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century. Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail. ... It probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII's court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women. ... In the words of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, "the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes."

Mantel is the first British winner of the Booker in 5 years. Of the £50,000 prize money, Mantel is quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying :

It's earnings. That may seem a very cold way of looking at a major award, but cost out what an author earns per hour and it's far, far less than the minimum wage. The return is not great. The money from prizes, welcome though it is, must be used to pay the mortgage.

Worth reading is this review of the novel by Janet Maslin in The New York Times. There's an interesting interview with Mantel up on the Booker website and another by Ada Edemariam in The Guardian. You can read the extract from the novel (which appeared in The New York Review of Books) here. You can also hear Nabtel talk about the book and read from it on the BBC website.

A Novel of the Emergency Years

Got a very nice surprise in the post today. Philip Tatham of Monsoon Books sent me his latest publication - Frederick Lees' novel The Malayan Life of Ferdach O'Haney. The cover art (which shows the Sultan Abdul Samad building and cricketers on the padang in front of the Selangor Club) is just beautiful, and here's the blurb on the back to whet your appetite. :

It is 1950 and the Federation of Malaya is in the throes of the Malayan Emergency. The British are struggling to defeat the communist terrorists and deal with rising nationalism in the colony.

Ferdach O’Haney arrives in Malaya as a young Anglo-Irish man to serve the Federation government, and he is plunged into the nitty-gritty of Malayan Emergency duties in the New Villages and in the communistoccupied jungles of Perak.

Gregarious and bisexual, O’Haney is equally at home in the brothels of Penang and in Singapore’s sleazy Bugis Street as he is in the corridors of British intelligence at Phoenix Park in Singapore and in the manicured grounds of King’s House and Carcosa in Kuala Lumpur. He befriends communist terrorists and nationalist sympathisers, experiences the bloody Maria Hertogh race riots, and comes up against prejudiced colonial administrators. O’Haney meets General Briggs and Chin Peng, the leader of the communist guerrillas, and he reveals new information about the assassination of Sir Henry Gurney.

The Malayan Life of Ferdach O’Haney is a fictionalised account of the author Frederick Lees’ own experiences in 1950s Malaya.

The first part of this novel was actually published in 2004 by Silverfish Books as Fool's Gold.

You might remember I blogged about Freddie as the Englishman who shouted the third Merdeka! You can read more about him, and an extract from the book here.

Rainforest Tears : The Website

Rainforest Tears author Paul Leslie Smith has created one of the best author sites for his book that I've seen ... anywhere on the web. (Go visit and tell me if it isn't!) You can read a synopsis, find out about Paul and how he wrote the book, and learn something about the background. There are also useful links if you want to uncover more of the history behind the fiction.

There is apparently a whizzier international version of the site in the pipeline (no pun intended) that opens up with a Google Earth type fly in to Sarawak from Europe since a lot of people know nothing of Sarawak.

The book is now being promoted by Marshall Cavendish Singapore which Paul feels is much more proactive than the KL counterpart and will soon appear on Amazon.co.uk, while Penguin Australia is also ready to take it. Paul is looking for a UK publisher, but says he is not sure how to go about finding one. (If anyone is passing by looking for a highly publishable manuscript, let me put you in touch with Paul.)

He is working on the sequel now :

Plot scratched out on paper, starting to fill in the gaps. Looking at my hopes for R. Tears at a similar, embryonic stage I am more hopeful for the sequel.

Reclaiming History

It saddens me that Malaysia does not make more of its wide and varied history.

How on earth does a British engineer in the oil and gas industry end up writing a huge historical novel set in Miri, Sarawak?

In the Sun Bissme S. interviews Paul Leslie Smith (whom some of you will remember from Readings@Seksan a couple of months back).

Paul describes how most of his novel, Rainforest Tears, which centres on the love story of a British man and a Chinese/Melanau woman, was written in hotel rooms as he travelled for business. (Writing it kept him out of the bars, he says!) He also explains how he interviewed folks in Miri who had lived through the war, including one 82 year old man who moved him to tears:

He told me how they had a fine, thriving town before the Japanese arrive. ... Then he said the Japanese spent three years beating them, raping them, killing them and leaving them with nothing.

I met Paul for coffee a week or two ago and he showed me the old photographs he collected as he was doing his research and will soon be putting up on a website. I had no idea that Miri had such a fascinating past!

Fear and Censorship

The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.

Asra Q. Nomani in the Asian Wall Street Journal examines a particularly worrying case of censorship.

Publisher Random House's decided to pull the plug on historical romance The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones (for which it had paid an advance of $100,000) after it received cautionary advice came from University of Texas Professor Denise Spellberg that it could :

... incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.

Nomani says :

This saga upsets me as a Muslim -- and as a writer who believes that fiction can bring Islamic history to life in a uniquely captivating and humanizing way. ... Literature moves civilizations forward, and Islam is no exception. There is in fact a tradition of historical fiction in Islam, including such works as "The Adventures of Amir Hamza," an epic on the life of Muhammad's uncle.

Jones said that she was devastated after the book got spiked:

I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored -- silenced -- by historians.

Geoffrey Robertson QC,who acted for Rushdie in the Satanic Verses case calls for compensation in the Guardian and says :

We can't be overcritical of American publishers for cowering under terrorist threats. ... all who care about free speech have a duty to make this sort of censorship counterproductive. Random House should pay this author substantial compensation, and the book should be placed on a website so everyone can read it.

Ah well, let's start with the Prologue to the novel which you can find here.

And there's another intriguing "is it censorship, or isn't it?" case in the Guardian today. Max Malik (left), claims that his novel The Butterfly Hunter was not submitted for final adjudication of the Muslim Writers award because of its controversial subject matter.

He was told that his novel had been dropped off the list "in error". Something that I find hard to believe given that he won top prize in the award last year! (Or if it was a genuine mistake, it indicates mindblowing incompetence!)

Shirley's Shawl

Author Shirley Lim was wonderful fun yesterday, as she launched her new book, Princess Shawl, written for women aged :

... from 9-90!

Looking enviably slim and energetic in a floral dress (don't you just love the irrelevant sartorial details?), Lim explained how this was her first experience of writing for children, and described it as her most joyful book.

She was approached to write a children's book by R. Ramachandran, the director of the Singaporean Book Development Council who realised that most of the children's books available in Singapore are published in the West, and she says that being seen for the first time that someone had seen her as a local writer rather than as a "transplanted writer" (she has lived in the US for 40 years) and that touched her in a way she hadn't felt before.

She set out to write the book without any idea about who would publish her, was turned down by publishers including Marshall Cavendish, but at the no point lost faith in the value of her work. In the end Maya Press took the gamble, except, says Lim laughing, it isn't even a gamble because they will lose money on it.

She said that she was retelling a story that had meant a lot to her as a young girl and it took her back to her earliest memories of Malacca (which she jokingly calls "Blackbird Town" because the Singaporeans turn up there singing "Cheap! Cheap!").

She talked about how she used to go up St. Paul's Hill to study, sitting by the open windows in the ruined church to read and study so that there is a great deal of Malacca in herself :

... malacca air, malacca breezes, malacca particles

Pricess Shawl borrows elements of traditional fairytale writing. There is a quest - the child Mei Li is given the quest of rescuing princess Hang Li Po exiled to the island of pulau tikus and unable to come to Malacca to marry the Sultan. And like many children's books, Princess Shawl involves time travel. Lim actually describes the book as a kueh lapis* story because it goes back and forward between layers of time, visiting the time of the Baba-Nyonya's, the Dutch Colonial war, the Portuguese period and the defeat of the Malacca Sultanate, the botton layer of the cake being the C15th.

The character of Great Aunty Mei Li, Lim says was based on the much admired lawyer, P.J. Lim - one of Lim's childhood heroines. The book itself is layered so that there are references in there that an adult reader would appreciate - as Lim puts it, she's smuggled in plenty about the diaspora Chinese. (The book is in the process of being translated into Chinese in Taiwan.)

To write the love story between Princess Hang Li Po and her Sultan, Lim said that she went back to reread Jane Eyre! She also seems to have had delicious fun making the good women get younger, and the bad women get older!

The question time opened into a nice discussion about local children's books (we agreed - too many have beautiful illustrations but the content is very weak indeed), Singapore's generous support for its children's writers, and the origins of Malay legends.

I was intrigued by her attitude to publication: she said that she never worried about whether her work is published or not as long as it is out in the world, and she had a lovely quote from Indian author Shashi Tharoor to show what she means:

I write, as George Bernard Shaw said, for the same reason a cow gives milk: it is inside me, it has got to come out, and in a real sense I would die if I could not.

She talked about writing "heuristically" and her advice to writers :

You learn what you have to say as you write - if you don't surprise yourself, you won't write anything interesting.

We had a nice social time after that. It was nice to meet John of Maya Press and Mr. Law King Hui, the poor organiser of the KL Bookfair who had to change all his banners and posters because of me! (See here and here.) Aiyoh, I felt so shamefaced that I caused so much trouble, but he was astonishingly sanguine about it.

Also had a nice chat to Prof Kayum - am seriously thinking a writing a thesis of some kind on the Malaysian novel. (How long have I been saying that for? My life is full of unrealised projects.)

Had a giggle with Phek Chin and Raman about an entry in the new The Complete Residents' Guide to Kuala Lumpur which describes in Raman, in it's section on bookshops, as the "charismatic" owner of Silverfish. (Not grouchy, huh???)

Then dinner with Daphne and Priya to think up some nice pieces of literary activism and exchange all our gossip.

* A traditional Malacca rice flour cake which is made in layers and very time consuming to produce.
** Actually Tharoor wrongly attributes this - the original quote is from Henry Louis Mencken : his exact words:

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

But I think there's something wrong with you as a writer if you don't have that feeling so no wonder others since have appropriated it!

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 1 : Born in a Library!

My interview with Kunal Basu, author of The Opium Clerk, The Miniaturist, Racists and The Japanese Wife and Other Stories is in the current issue of Off The Edge where it looks very pretty on the page and appears alongside a piece on the author by Mark Disney. I thank the magazine for giving me permission to use this on my blog, and distributors Pansing for organising the interview. I have split the piece into two parts and the second will be up tomorrow. (This is an earlier draft version and is organised a little differently from the print version.)

Kunal Basu was, it seems, was literally born to the writing life.

His father was a publisher and who met his mother, Shabi, when he published her first book. (She is still producing two books a year at the age of 86.) Basu himself was actually born on the floor of the library of the house in Bengal, surrounded by tall bookshelves. His mother, rushing to finish a manuscript for a publisher, failed to set out for the hospital on time. His aunt cut the chord with a pair of scissors, and his father, in all the excitement forgot to register the birth. “But he kept a meticulous diary,” Basu says “and on 4th May 1956 there’s this one line : Son born. 6.43 a.m..”

He describes his childhood in a house filled with books and lively intellectual discourse, and a constant flow of visiting politicians, authors and painters. He started writing as a teenager and had some stories published in his native Bangla.

He had always thought of himself as a person in the arts, and still seems somewhat surprised that circumstances carried him in a totally different direction. He made, what he now calls, “wrong academic decisions”, studying science and maths before completing his doctorate in marketing with the University of Florida. He became Associate Professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill University, Canada, before moving to Templeton College, Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Oxford Advanced Management Program.

Whilst he says that he does not regret following this academic path, he says that there has been an internal price to pay: “As one gets older it becomes more difficult to do the things one doesn’t like. And my relationship with writing is nothing short of a grand obsession. I don’t want to do anything else anymore. I want to get up in a morning and just write.”

However, he’s grateful for the opportunities the academic life has given him to travel to parts of the world he might not otherwise have visited. His friends, though, always pull his leg about the fact that as soon as he turns up in a place, political turmoil ensues. “I was Iran when the Shah was deposed, China during the Tiananmen crisis and in Indonesia when Suharto was moving on.” Fortunately, nothing untoward happened in Malaysia on this visit.

While many Indian authors writing from the west seem to be fueled by a sense of alienation, that’s not something that comes through in Basu’s work. “We all build fiction around our lives,” he says “and my convenient fiction is that I haven’t left India, I’ve just gone travelling.”

The travels have lasted 30 years or so, but as Basu sees it, it’s been simply a matter of changing habitat rather than changing home, and he finds that rather exciting. “I love to live in different countries, different parts of the world, different houses, and have different sets of friends. Home for me in many respects is my deep seated cultural moorings and they are not necessarily parochial and not necessarily all tied to India. They are things like books that I’ve grown up with, plays that I’ve acted in or seen, favourite films. I feel very much at home around the Thames because Dickens was an early favourite of mine and the dockside and the docklands of London feel like home for me. And so there are these pegs that tie me to my world and those don’t shift very much.”

His commissioning editor once told him that although he is an Indian author, his writing doesn’t smell of curry. “I said I’m not deliberately trying to create distinction for myself, but I think there are all kinds of thing on my palate, not simply the curry.”

Indeed, Basu’s most recent novel Racists (published in 2006) is the very first Victorian novel written by a person of colour. It features an almost completely white cast of characters and explores the subject of racial science. It wasn’t, he says, written out of any kind of personal angst, and the subject matter took him completely by surprise. The novel began with a single image in his head, that of two children, one black, one white, being raised in isolation on a deserted island off the coast of Africa by a mute nurse, and untainted, as it were by “civilization”.

He knew nothing about racial science at first, but as he started to do his research in Oxford’s Bodleian library, he knew he had discovered a world he wanted to inhabit. He confesses that he is intrigued by what he calls “our indecent curiosity” into the notion of what explains difference.

The experiment at the core of Racists, he agrees, is a product of the rivalry between the two scientists, one French and one British, and the battle between their competing ideologies rather than a meaningful piece of scientific research.

“The thing is that in many ways we think of science as being very objective. But when it comes down to it, it is a human endeavour and like all human endeavours it’s permeated by competition, rivalry, bias, love, hate. Everything. So why should this experiment be any different ? And data isn’t neutral. It talks in the voice of the collector and the observer. If you have two observers, then obviously the data is ambivalent and that’s exactly the case with Belavoix and Bates were trying to do.”

It’s a truism frequently tossed in the direction of new writers that you should write about what you know, so it comes as a surprise to learn then that Basu finds it extremely exciting to write about places he hasn’t visited beforehand. If he had, he says, the experience might actually have impeded, rather than enhanced, his historical imagination.

Kucing, Sarawak, features prominently in Basu’s his first novel, The Opium Clerk. Although he only managed to make his first to the city on his way back from Australia last year, and doesn’t regret at all that he hadn’t been there when researching the novel.

“When I read the diaries and the history and started imagining Kucing, I think it was closer in many ways to Kucing of the nineteenth century. One doesn’t necessarily have to travel physically if one travels in imagination,” he says. But, he cautions, “Imagination has to be helped by research by reading the right things, and the right props are necessary.”

He set his second novel, The Miniaturist, in the court of the emperor Akbar in C16th India, but says that it was much too dangerous to travel to Afghanistan and to the Hindu Kush at the time of writing it. However, he says that he experienced the core of the story because he had travelled in the Mogul parts of India, eaten Mogul food, and listened to Sufi music, and read substantially about that period.

Tommorow, find out how the film of The Japanese Wife came to be made, and read about where Kunal gets his ideas for stories from!

(Pic above taken by Kavita of Pansing.)

Historical Fiction Giveaway

Who's into historical fiction?

I have a single copy of Anne Easter Smith's latest novel Daughter of York in trade paperback edition to give away to a blogreader thanks to Katie Bowen of Simon & Schuster. Described as:

Enjoyable, beautifully researched - a vivid portrait of one of history's most enigmatic women ...

the novel tells the story of Margaret, Plantagenet princess and sister of Edward IV and Richard III.

You can find out more about Anne and her book on her website, and I enjoyed this short video in which she talks about the process of researching and writing a historical novel and the challenges having to juggle real and imagined characters.


If you would like a chance to win this copy, say why you'd like it in the comments. The best reason wins!

I'm going to limit the competition to readers in the KL/PJ area who can collect the book from me in person (and maybe buy me a cup of coffee at the same time). I am too lazy to do that thing with envelopes and stamps.

And I hope to find some more giveaways for you all in the future.

Searching the Past

The hand of destiny brought together two authors from opposite sides of the world who found they had a great deal in common in a panel discussion called Searching the Past, at the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival. It was an extremely interesting discussion in which the two authors discovered that they had a lot of common ground.

Tan Twan Eng is of course Malaysian of Chinese descent, while Madeleine Thien has Malaysian-Chinese parents but lives in Vancouver.

Twan's novel is set in Penang, Thien's latest novel Certainty is set in Sandakan where her father grew up. Both set their novels during World War II and the Japanese invasion figures large. (She told us how her grandfather had worked for the Japanese and was taken away to be killed when her father was only 5 years old.) Her novel explores the theme of displacement.

Both books, as moderator Joanna Saville pointed out, are about human choices and about fate and destiny and how much we can control.

And both novels have won critical acclaim and have been serious contenders for prestigious literary prizes. Twan of course was Booker longlisted for The Gift of Rain, while Thien was shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize for novels from the Pacific Rim for Certainty.

(You might also like to check out her previous books Simple Recipes (a collection of stories) and The Chinese Violin (a children's book).)


How difficult was it for them to carry out the research for their books?

Thien found it hard to obtain first hand information from her family, as they didn't want to talk about that period, so she came to Malaysia for two months in 1999.

Sandakan had been "bombed to bits in the war", she says, and so she found herself writing about a place that had essentially been lost.

But she didn't feel so strange going back - she still has family there, and her father had drawn a map for her from memory which enabled her to find her way around, and so she says there was a sense of entering the world of the novel. She found people in Sandakan willing to talk to her about that period of history: most hadn't been asked about their wartime experiences for so many years.

However, because she does not speak Hakka and Malay, so she always felt that she was at one remove from the people she interviewed. (This proved to be another area of similarity between the two authors, as Twan does not speak Mandarin or a Chinese dialect either.)

Twan said said that he did not need to do any specific research before starting the novel as he has always read a great deal about the period although the literature on the 2nd World War was written by the British rather than by the local inhabitants. And he said that that it was only in the older generation of Malaysians has he heard rancour against the Japanese for atrocities committed during the war.

He described Penang as a main character in the book, and said that he felt a need to record a part of the world that is so quickly changing.

Twan also explained how he had begun writing The Gift of Rain. He'd always felt that he wanted to write but finally had some time on his hands when he was doing his Masters in Shipping Law with the University of Cape Town. He originally set out to write what he says was
a 100 page short story about three minor characters whom he wanted to include in a much larger novel, but their story grew and grew until it became the present novel!

The novel was actually written on the edge of the desert in Kimberley, and his longing for rain in this arid landscape seeps into the opening pages so much you can almost smell the scent of it ...