Twan Eng - Guardian Blogged

Tan Twan Eng's The Gift of Rain is reviewed on the Guardian blog by Sam Jordison who compares the writing first of all to Conrad, and then says:

... a more accurate comparison for the book could be to a Merchant Ivory film ... Only with far more martial arts and far less Helena Bonham Carter.

Jordison says he will be upset if the novel doesn't make the shortlist. Likewise.

We'll all know on Friday.

Jordison also reviews Edward Docx Self Help, another of the longlisted titles, but I don't dare even glance at the piece until I've read the novel ... and I'm still waiting for it to arrive here. Previously reviewed, Peter Ho Davies' The Welsh Girl.

Actually I'm screaming with frustration. Why is there so little time between the longlist being announced and the shortlist? One month doesn't give readers sufficient time to buy (and afford!) and read and digest all the chosen books, and unless you do manage to tackle them all you can't really enter into the fun of comparing them or really have an opinion along with the judges, about what should win. (Course, normal sane people don't worry about such things.)

I'm now onto my fifth longlisted book, Indra Sinha's Animal's People which within the first forty pages has totally beguiled me. Twan Eng has some pretty stiff competition!

Twan Eng's Booker Update

Booker season continues and I'm at the starting line hoping to complete the marathon read so that opinions can be expressed before the shortlist is announced but don't think in all honesty I am going to get very far. A good book won't be rushed and I'm a slow reader anyway.

Fortunately some of the titles are already in the shops (I've checked with Kinokuniya and MPH) and I bet the rest can't be far behind. (But who but me, and maybe Animah, is mad enough to want the lot?) I've begun with Peter Ho Davies The Welsh Girl and am experiencing deja vu.

I've read the first two chapters before ... but where? All I can think is that they were in one of the British Council's New Writing collections, but not one i can find on my shelves. Can anyone enlighten me??

Anyway how's Twan Eng's book faring? It's still there in the amazon.co.uk bestseller list (the only Booker book in there apart from McEwan's, tipped as favourite!). It looks like the book is getting the popular vote.

The Telegraph has links to reviews of all 13 titles (the so-called "Booker Dozen") here.

Ed Lake reviews The Gift of Rain and has mixed feelings about it.

... the detached, aesthetic air, concentration on the visual and racy, episodic plotting -might perhaps have been more naturally realised in a decent Manga production.

Ouch! But he is taken with its:

... wistful and surprisingly earnest supernaturalism. Its characters all seem to have met in previous lives, to be haunted by ancient prophecies, or to be cursed to turn into one another. ... The bittersweet mood is heightened by the chinoiserie of the metaphorical palette - puddles resemble dragon scales, voices sound like wind-chimes, and even a kick in the kidneys produces calligraphy: a pain that flares "like red ink splashed on paper". The effect is almost psychotically tasteful.

Closer to home, Haliza Hashim Doyle writes about Twan Eng in the weekend edition of the Malay Mail.

And Twan himself sent me this more than enthusiastic review by Wilhem Snyman the Cape Town Post (no doubt his local paper for the time being!)

Set in the agonising years of Malaya’s occupation by the Japanese during World War II, from February 1942 to September 1945, Tan Twan Eng places at the centre of his story a young man, Philip Hutton, half English, half Chinese and his friendship with a high-ranking Japanese official before and during the brutal occupation of the island of Penang and its capital Georgetown.

As Tan Twan Eng has mentioned in interviews, he was influenced by many authors, not least of whom W. Somerset Maugham. One can discern the similarly deft objectivity and thorough characterization in Eng’s work as well.

The young protagonist, Philip, is torn between his patrician English world and his equally patrician Chinese world, with the result that somehow within himself he must coalesce these two seemingly contradictory worlds. Yet he remains an outsider looking into the British colonial establishment while at the same time being part of it, yet not fully accepted as he embraces his Chinese cultural heritage in tandem. Almost as a way of trying to resolve these inner conflicts he embarks on a dangerous relationship with the mysterious Endo-san, the enigmatic Japanese who hires an off-shore island from Philip’s father.

The relationship develops further as the mysteries and discipline of Japanese martial arts are imparted to the young Philip, as Endo-san becomes the young man’s spiritual guide and mentor. War clouds loom and Philip has to choose between his loyalty to his family and his relationship to someone rapidly being perceived as the enemy.

The war starts on December 7th 1941 as the Japanese forces attack Kota Bahru in northern Malaya , routing the ill-prepared dilly-dallying, shilly-shallying British forces before them. Soon Penang is invaded and the British residents – in a well-documented act of ignominy - rush for the ships to take them to Singapore , Ceylon and beyond, leaving the Chinese and Malays at the mercy of the arch-enemy, Japan . But Philip’s father and family remain and Philip has to choose where his loyalties lie and court censure as he collaborates with the Japanese in order to protect his family.

That’s the plot in simple terms – Tan Twan Eng has taken the raw material of history and woven a deeply moving tale of a man’s life. We meet Philip as an elderly man, recounting and explaining himself, while at the same time a tension is maintained throughout as we follow Philip’s anguish, ambiguity and ambivalence as he navigates his way through the treacherous waters of betrayal and loyalty and simply growing up in extraordinary times.

We meet Philip very much as Somerset Maugham writes of a certain kind of individual who has experienced much in life, in Gentleman in the Parlour: “They have a life in themselves that they keep apart, and there is a look in their eyes, as it were turned inwards, that informs us that this hidden life is the only one that signifies to them. And now and then their eyes betray a weariness with the social round into which hazard or the fear of seeming odd has for a moment forced them. They seem then to long for the monotonous solitude of some place of their predilection where they can be once more alone with the reality they have found”.

Tan Twan Eng reveals just such a man to us in the elderly Philip, while at the same time we join the young Philip on his perilous journey to self-awareness, to the spiritual mastery of his realm, a mastery ironically imparted to him by the one who used him to reveal military secrets to the Japanese.

A further level of significance of this seminal novel is that in the annals of Malaysian literature, and to use that hackneyed term, “post colonial” literature, The Gift of Rain is an example of literary maturity, where the contradictions of a colonial past are grafted onto a vision for the
present and the future, without rancour but rather with grace, stylistic elegance and compassion. The Gift of Rain is a coming to terms with the past, in this case with Malaysia ’s darkest hour when Malaya and its peoples were abandoned by their British colonial masters, who couldn’t protect her subjects, and delivered them to the wrath of the Japanese after an ill-conceived military defence.

Asked why he chose that period in history rather than contemporary Malaysia, Eng points out in that so little has been written about the war period in Malaya, especially by Malaysians. There are famous novels such as Tanamera and The Singapore Grip and of course Nevil Shute’s famous A Town Like Alice , but these were not written by Malaysian authors.

Significant too is that in Tan Twan Eng we have an author of a younger generation exploring the history of his country and writing for the present generation, dipping into the past and the present with effortless ease, all the while arresting one’s attention, maintaining suspense and recreating the bygone world of Penang with its rich and layered history. Penang, an entrepot of the British empire and founded by Francis Light in the 1780s, called peoples from all over Asia to its shores. Throughout Eng gives us the street names, (Armenia Street, Campbell Street, Bangkok Street etc) and various recipes associated with Penang’s Georgetown, taking the reader into Philip’s world, and making this novel not only an evocation of a personal odyssey, but also a homage to one of the world’s most inspiring historical settings. Says Eng:
“I was born in Penang and I’ve always wanted to write about Penang. People will argue that I don’t know the place as it was in the 1940s. But things like street names and places haven’t changed. If you wanted to write about Kuala Lumpur, everything has changed, buildings have been torn down. If you read The Gift of Rain and then take a trip to Penang all the places referred to are all still there. I suppose you could say I take a romantic, nostalgic view.”

However romantic or nostalgic the view Eng adopts, the novel reveals an emotional depth coupled with a heartfelt exploration of a dramatic moment in a community’s history and how war ravaged a hitherto relatively harmonious tranquility. A richly rewarding read.

But please dear world, he is not Mr. Eng, he is Mr. Tan! Please get his name right!!!!!

Celebrating Mr. Eng from Penarth

At least Starmag noticed we had a Malaysian on the Booker longlist! They reproduced the piece from the Guardian I linked to the other day and slipped into brackets an e-mail response from Tan Twan Eng:

It's an immense honour for a first-time novelist ... I received the news on Tuesday night and was completely stunned - I still am! I am thrilled to be in such esteemed company like McEwan and A.N.Wilson.

I'm also gratified that the judges are open to voices coming from South-East Asia. There is a huge pool of talented writers here waiting to be discovered by the rest of the world, with compelling stories to tell.

Meanwhile it's Booker silly season, and this year, thanks to Twan we feel we have a ringside seat.

Sam Jordison on the Guardian blog has decided to discuss one book from the list each week working down the list in alphabetical order, even though that means the final book will be discussed long after the prize is awarded!

Of course, given a name like Tan Twan Eng, of course the surname must be Eng (!), and therefore The Gift of Rain gets discussed in week 4!

(I remember Viz getting all humpfy in the comments on this blog one day about Malaysian Chinese authors switching round their names so the family name comes last e.g. Tinling Choong, Yang-May Ooi, but now you see how confused a western audience can be!)

This is not the only Chinese name that gives problems on the list: Sam Jordison finds Peter Ho Davies middle name "rather amusing" as he has a go at judging the longlisted books by their covers. Of The Gift of Rain he says:

I'm not sure what the butterflies and torn bits of wallpaper signify, and the red and gold type has unfortunate echoes of a cheap Chinese restaurant. All the same, the back-cover blurb about aikido and knowledge coming "at a terrible price" sounds exciting and I'm already biased in the book's favour as it's a product of one of the two independent publisher underdogs on the list.

(My favourite covers, by the way, are those for Lloyd Jones' Mr. Pip and Peter Ho Davies The Welsh Girl.)

And talking of Wales, did you know that The Gift of Rain is actually set ... ahem ... in Penarth?

Our Mr. Eng is learning exciting new things about his novel all the time!

Twan on Booker Longlist!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just now I flipped to the Guardian website, saw the news and then just burst into tears.

The Booker Prize longlist was announced last night.

And Tan Twan Eng's Gift of Rain is on there!!!! (How many exclamation marks can I get away with? Remember, this is probably the world's most prestigious literary prize.)

I'm so very happy for him. So very proud of him.

Happy for all of us too and feel like trotting out again that old saw - Malaysia Boleh!!!

Before I get too carried away and glurgacious, Sarah Crowne refers to this year's longlist as being "low-key" with:

... four first-time novelists and a near-total absence of literary stars

And there are only 13 titles this time rather than the 18-24 of previous years.

I am myself very surprised not to see Michael Ondaatje and Graham Swift on there. But McEwan makes it, and the other big name on the list is of course A.N. Wilson.

There is another author of course on the list with a Malaysian connection - Peter Ho Davies who has a Malaysian mum!

Here's the longlist in full:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate)
• Self Help by Edward Docx (Picador)
• The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (Myrmidon)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies (Sceptre)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• Gifted by Nikita Lalwani (Viking)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, (Jonathan Cape)
• What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn (Tindal Street)
• Consolation by Michael Redhill (William Heinemann)
• Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)
• Winnie & Wolf by AN Wilson (Hutchinson)

More about this later.

(By the way, sorry I'm a bit of a dozy blogger at the moment, and posting erratically. I've got a lot of work on and am enjoying it, but have less free time than before. Nevertheless, will do my best.)

Update:

I like what Deepika wrote. And Asian Literary Review editor, Nury Vittachi, confesses to being "blown away" by one of Twan's short stories ...

Rumblings of the Pyschic Bowel and Other Writerly Ruminations

Some rather telling quotes from authors who have been featured in the book pages this week:

To look Asian but to speak with a British accent completely threw people. I liked that; it felt as if I was just under the radar. You couldn't place me through accent or class or ethnic things.

Peter Ho Davies on living between cultures in an interview with Liz Hoggard in today's Observer. His mother is Malaysian Chinese, his father Welsh, and he grew up in Coventry in the British Midlands. His excellent debut collection of short fiction The Ugliest House in the World won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen award, and two of the stories were set in Malaysia. (Though Thor wasn't impressed with his factual accuracy, remember?) Now his long-awaited first novel The Welsh Girl is out.

What do I think about linking the Virginia Tech killer to violent fiction? Actually, my reaction might surprise you. You think I'm going to instantly lay down a distinction between real-life psychopaths and those of us who write about them for a living?... But I do actually think there's something rather strange regarding those (like me) who write about such things - or, for that matter, those who want to read about them. After all, to write repeatedly about people dying horrifically is an odd way to make a living... but then I'm in a queasy collusion with my readers. So I'm prepared to spread the blame about a little.

Yes, you guys must take some of the blame for Dublin born author John Connolly's warped imagination. Connolly's new novel The Unquiet, is in the bookshops now. Read the whole interview in the Independent.

It seems to me that any kind of creativity, whether it be writing a novel or inventing something, is a slow accretion of knowledge, working through mistakes, failures, of figuring out what is right for you, what doesn't work ... Every single one of my short stories was a way of finding my more natural voice, which I think is the voice of Careless.

Deborah Robertson who tells Deborah Hope in the Australian how she made the transition from writer of short stories to first-time novelist. Robertson won the Aus$20,000 Nita B. Kibble prize for women writers against a field of more experienced writers, including Gail Jones. Her novel, Careless, has also been entered for a whole slew of other awards including the Miles Franklin and the Orange.

I think it's like a lot of the creative talents; the talent does have to be there, but it also needs to be cultivated in the right way. Part of this is steely determination, a lot of it is a willingness to hunker down deep inside yourself and listen to the sound of your own, psychic bowel - no matter how unpleasant it may be.

Author Will Self talks to Sarah Kinson in the Guardian about why he writes and dispenses some good advice for writers. He is currently working on a novel called The Butt which is an allegory of the way that liberals in the US and Britain responded to the invasion of Iraq.

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!