Old Filth by Jane Gardam

The voids of his ignorance opened before him. I'm still the foreigner. To them. And to myself, here. I've no background. I've been peeled off my background. I've been attached to another background like a cut-out. I'm only someone they've been kind to for eight years because Pat was a loner till I came along. I'm socially a bit dubious, because they know my father went barmy. And because of living in the heart of darkness and something funny going on in Wales. And the stammer.

Old F-I-L-T-H: "Failed in London, try Hong Kong." Such is the nickname of Edward Feathers, a distinguished and superannuated English barrister, born in colonial Malaya, served in Hong Kong, and now retired in Dorset. Old Filth captures Feathers toward the end of his life, just after the death of his wife Betty, and the sudden appearance of his old rival--and Betty's former lover--who's moved in next door. The death of his wife sends Feathers on sort of a mental loop, going over the facts of his long and complicated life: being sent away from Malaya by his father, being summoned back for protection at the outbreak of World War II, the ship being turned around because of Japanese attacks on Ceylon, the love affair with his best friend's sister, his first ventures into the world of law. In London's Inner Temple he is a kind of living legend, a link with hoary Empire--but for Feathers, the past is not past.

Old Filth is dedicated to "Raj Orphans" like Feathers: the children of British colonial administrators who were sent away, back to the motherland, to be raised by foster families. The through-line of Old Filth, if there is one, is Feathers' perpetual feelings of outsiderhood: first in Malaya, where he is the only white child among his first friends (interestingly, Malay is his first language), then in England, where his strange colonial background can never quite be accommodated. Feathers, by his own account, never loses these feelings of foreignness, even as he rises to a rank of elevated esteem--that esteem, of course, having only been possibly in Hong Kong, not London.

Old Filth is, in a superficial way at least, a comedy, or a muted sort of farce. There's something funny, you know, in the way Feathers makes it all the way to Ceylon from England, by way of Sierra Leone, being extracted back into the colonial childhood he's tried to put behind him, only for the boat to turn around--and for Feathers to end up hospitalized for months, racked by parasitic worms lurking in African bananas. There's comedy, too, when Feathers is appointed a special bodyguard to the Queen (at that point, George VI's wife Mary), and using a spare hour in London as an excuse to look up--and bed--his crush. Much of the humor, though, comes from the latter day Feathers, whose lurch toward doddering senility produces a number of goofy foibles and misunderstandings.

Some of this is funny, and Feathers as a character is engaging. It was interesting enough to read about the experience of a "Raj Orphan," a Britisher who, by virtue of being born in the colonies, never quite fits in anywhere. By the time Feathers is an eminence grise, the world he came from no longer exists, and he is in a way doubly out of place. (Old Filth, like Feathers himself, feels a little dusty and anachronistic; it was shocking to read about his reaction to 9/11 and remember that the book is not so old.) But it's also a book with more ideas than it can really handle, threads that get picked up and dropped: the cuckolding rival, the enigmatic cousins, the shrewd niece-in-law. The late reveal (spoiler alert) that Feathers, as a child, helped murder his malicious foster mother, seemed so strange and out of place that I can only assume I missed some key foreshadowing. Old F-I-L-T-H: "Failed in logic, tried humor." OK, that's maybe a little too far--but you try making the anagram fit.

Unrest by Yeng Pway Ngon

For a while, because the storyline of the male protagonist and me wouldn't move forward, the whole novel got stuck there, and the writer didn't know what to do next. But he sensed that this delay and blockage were caused by me. He was right, I deliberately escaped from his narrative, because I wasn't satisfied with his writing, nor the way he arranged my destiny. I felt this was a book about several men, with the women there to run circles around them--marry a chicken, lead a chicken's life. Why should I put up with a husband who considered himself a playboy? Why give up my individuality and freedom to live with such a man, just because that's the author's plan? Can't I decide my own destiny and future? Shouldn't my existence have some meaning apart from satisfying the possessive urges of men?

Once a revolutionary, always a revolutionary--in the eye of the regime, at least. In reality, rebellion is often the brief province of youth, though its consequences may resound through the years, determining the course of a life long after the revolution has died. The four Chinese characters at the heart of Singaporean Yeng Pway Ngon's novel Unrest find middle age to be as great a challenge, at least, as the political upheavals of their youth--and one they must face without the ardor of their early life.

Weikang and Guoliang grow up in Malaysia and attend a prep school in Singapore, where they become involved with communist student groups. From there, their paths diverge: Weikang, targeted by the regime of Lee Kwan Yew, emigrates to China, where he finds his idealism dashed by the brutal realities of the Cultural Revolution. Guoliang stays in Singapore, growing meek and purposeless under the eye of a mother he despises. Ziqin and Daming are a couple who, also intending to emigrate to China, never get past Hong Kong. Daming, the most radical of them all, becomes a capitalist and a womanizer whose infidelities torture Ziqin.

In the 1980s, the characters find themselves thrust together in various combinations for the first time in decades: Weikang and Guoliang meet for the first time since, as young men, a drunk Weikang took sexual advantage of his equally drunk friend. In another moment, Ziqin initiates an affair with Guoliang. Guoliang, still meek and abashed, is the opposite of the caddish Daming; though Ziqin is ambivalent about the affair at first, it is a first step toward agency and independence. Sex hangs over the novel as intensely as political violence--obviously, the secondary meaning of the title can hardly be ignored. Is it too late for sexual gratification, just as it seems too late to truly be a radical? Is Weikang's indiscretion with Guoliang something that can be left in the past, or will it follow as surely as his political baggage?

Yeng inserts himself ostentatiously into the narrative as the "author," arranging the plot of the book to his satisfaction. In Guoliang and Ziqin's narrative, they are identified at first only as the "male protagonist" and the "female protagonist." The female protagonist soon escapes the author's control, first disappearing, then refusing to follow Daming in emigration to Vancouver. When she's allowed to speak to herself, Ziqin asserts her right to an independent life, not just from Daming, but from authorial possessiveness; she's not required, she insists, to do what the author demands simply because his story demands it. These metafictional touches are probably the most interesting part of the book, though they don't feel exactly innovative or fresh. Still, in a novel whose characters are pushed around by the implacabilities of history, it's refreshing to see one stand up and say, No thanks--I'll live the life I want.

With the addition of Singapore, my "countries read" list is up to 83!

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

She was silent.  Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden a suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter's mind.  It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night.  She shuddered at what she saw.

Kitty Fane is unhappily married to a bacteriologist working for the British government in Hong Kong.  She imagines that the Assistant Colonial Secretary with whom she has been carrying on an affair will marry her, if they can both procure divorces, but he seems content to keep on in secret.  When her husband Walter discovers her infidelity, however, he demands that she accompany him into a Chinese city beset by cholera.

It's an act of desperate, unimaginable cruelty.  Walter--brooding, unsociable, bookish--wants to kill Kitty, and his anger is such that his own life is acceptable collateral.  If you imagine that the cholera-stricken Chinese will offer Kitty an opportunity to recognize the shallow vanity of "society" and find redemption by caring for others, you are of course correct.  The cholera epidemic awakens Kitty to the reality of death, though this awakening also gives her valuable perspective on her infidelity:

After all they had gone through, when they were living amid these scenes of horror and desolation, it seemed inept to attach importance to the ridiculous act of fornication.  When death stood round the corner, taking lives like a gardener digging up potatoes, it was foolishness to  care what dirty things this person or that did with his body.

Redemption comes in the form of an order of kindly Catholic nuns that care for sick and orphaned children; Kitty's only consolation comes from joining them in their duty.  Much of The Painted Veil proceeds according to the progression of moral development you might expect; it defies expectation perhaps only in the sense that the marriage, and Walter, are irrevocably broken before their excursion and cannot wholly be saved in any sense.  Maugham is careful not to oversell Kitty's moral development; her new compassion and awareness leave her a better person but also more isolated than ever.

But ultimately The Painted Veil failed to retain my imagination after it ended.  Maugham traveled throughout Southeast Asia, but his China rarely seems anything but an Englishman's view, described as through the curtains of a sitting chair.  Perhaps this makes sense, given Kitty's perspective--she is sheltered, for the most part, from the Chinese and from the devastation of the cholera--but it makes it difficult, I find, to comprehend the causes of her growth.  I wonder what the novel would have been like if Kitty had been able to spend more time within the city walls.