The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

'Where does a story begin, Willie?' I asked.

For a while he did not say anything. Then he shifted in his chair. 'Where does a wave on the ocean begin?' he said. 'Where does it for ma welt on the skin of the sea, to swell and expand and rush towards shore?'

'I want to tell you a story, Willie,' I said. Yes, I thought to myself. Tell him your story. Let him write it. Let the whole world know.

The music I had just played seemed to go on unspooling in the air between us, this song that had no beginning and no ending; the song of time itself.

In 1921, the British author William Somerset Maugham visits Penang, a colonial city in peninsular Malaysia. He bears with him several secrets: his sexuality, for one, and his affair with his "traveling companion" Gerald, but from Gerald he is keeping the fact that his investments have all cratered and he is essentially penniless. In Penang he stays with an old friend, Robert Hamlyn, whose wife Lesley has a secret of her own: the affair she had with a Chinese advisor to Sun Yat Sen during his exile from China in Penang. Lesley and "Willie" find an opportunity in each other; perhaps it is time for Lesley to finally tell the story she has kept to herself all these years, and for Willie, a great chronicler of the British colonial world, an irresistible story about the now-dead Sun may help return his fortune and fame.

The House Made of Doors, written by Malaysian writer Tan Twan Eng, offers itself as a meditation on the cultural collisions between the British, the Chinese, and the Malay in the early 20th century. A "ripped from the headlines" subplot involves Lesley's friend Ethel Proudlock, who has recently been arrested for shooting a man who may have been her lover, and who may have tried to rape her. Ethel's crime puts to the test whether a white woman in Penang can be convicted of a crime, and who exactly among the peninsula's many racial and governmental authorities holds control, and over whom. China exists off the page somewhere, and history seems to be happening there, unlike the sclerotic British elite of Penang. Lesley develops a passion for raising money for Sun Yat Sen's revolution against the emperor, less because of her concern for the plight of the everyday Chinese and more because, stuck in a mordant marriage to a gay man herself, she yearns for a passion of any kind. "Willie," and many others, believe her to have been the lover of Sun Yat Sen himself, but as she's told, Sun has enough wives, one of whom is the nation of China.

I thought this was sooo boring. For a novel about sexuality and passion, it's entirely sexless, in a way that matches the smoothed-over book-club prose. In retrospect, I should have known--the cover screams "front shelf at the Strand"--but there was an opportunity here, I think, to grapple with the kind of stories that Maugham wrote about British colonialism and the truth as experienced by Malaysians or the Straits Chinese. Tan is interested in Maugham as a character--a fairly wan and charisma-less one, at that--but never as an author, and seems to have made a conscientious decision not to quote from Maugham's fiction at all. I found the sexual drama to be predictable (the love note Lesley finds in her husband's pocket) and Arthur, Lesley's great love, to be entirely devoid of personality; I found the writing competent but cloying ("the song of time itself..." ugh). Not for me.

Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong

We notice Bi at the same time, in front of the prayer mat. When we lift our forehead from the floor, we see a trail of damp, muddy footprints leading to Bi's long, webbed feet. Bi is a gift from above. Heaven's answer to our prayers. Bi is all sinew and bone, dry and shriveled, scales almost too big for her body, like a frog just returned from the desert. Why does Bi look so strange? With our back to the light, we watch Bi fade away, like watching a shadow fall across a mirror. Who made Bi like this, amphibious, dual, neither of earth nor water? This is the question, hidden like frogspawn in the sand of the hourglass. We did, is the answer. Aminah and I. And the understanding undoes us, what to do, what to do. Go back to yesterday, the day before yesterday, the day before that--time is like a steamroller, crushing everything flat as a card and vanishing it into endless blackness. Aminah and I prefer to pretend that Bi fell from the sky. Fell like rain from on high. Imagine how far Bi must have come.

In "The Wall," the first story in Malaysian writer Ho Sok Fong's collection Lake Like a Mirror, a wall is built to protect a row of houses from a nearby road, leaving a backyard space that is just inches wide. A woman, whose daughter's car crash death preceded the wall, builds a garden in the long, skinny space, and even becomes skinny herself. Her cat disappears in the space, and then she herself, into the marginal place between the house and the highway, between the home and the world. The cat is discovered--a moldering corpse beneath the leaf litter and trash that such places collect--but the woman is never seen again.

Such uncanny moments are the highlights of this collection. Some are more subtle than others, subtle enough to disorient you, and make you wonder whether you have missed something: In "Summer Tornado," a woman follows a man and his children around an amusement park. Is she a stranger, being slowly absorbed into their domestic life? Or has she been the children's mother, suffering a strange alienation and detachment all along? She is, maybe, like the woman in "The Wall" who disappears into that neither-here-nor-there space. Another, more overt image is Bi, the imaginary froglike guardian who watches over Aminah and her friends in the oppressive girls' school where she is brought up to be a good Muslim. Bi, a frog, an amphibian, a creature of the land and water, home in both but in neither, may be a perfect guardian for a girl who feels neither here nor there, neither fully inside the mesh of power the school represents nor fully free from it.

Ho's stories often deal with the oppression of the Malaysian state. In another story, Aminah ("The name 'Aminah' is very common in Malay society," she writes, "as with Sarah or Mary, there can be many Aminahs") finds herself in a reeducation camp for those who wish to legally renounce their Islamic faith. The title story deals with a university professor who finds herself in the crosshairs of the Islamic censors, only to breathe a sigh of relief when another colleague finds herself fired instead. In this story, such rigid reactions encourage a kind of soft oppression in which people stifle themselves ("You should be more sensitive than they are," an administrator remarks), but Ho makes it clear that these systems are as insidious as the violence and rigidity that keep a character like Aminah imprisoned.

Some of Ho's stories are too cryptic: I felt like I was missing something in "Radio Drama" and "The Chest," some secondary layer that lurked in too much obscurity behind plainspoken prose. The collection may not get any better than that first story, "The Wall," though I did like the last story as well, "March in a Small Town," in which a young girl working at a seedy motel becomes obsessed with a man who checks in every night, seemingly without remembering he'd ever been there before. 

With the addition of Malaysia, my "Countries Read" list is up to 93!

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!