I have been interested in colonial Malaya, as it then was, since my father did his National Service there back in the early 1950s, teaching English to Gurkha troops during the guerrilla war between Communist pro-independence fighters and the British. He described ending up in a hill station in the centre of the country and only feeling safe in the company of the Gurkhas who would gather around him in the evening, wanting to hear stories of double decker buses and cinemas in Birmingham – the mystery of the West (as opposed to the Orient), I suppose. He also ate with the Gurkhas, and said that they were dreadful cooks, although entirely marvellous in every other respect. When he left to go back home on the SS Empire Windrush (yes, that Windrush) they presented him with a curved kukri which is still with me in my sock drawer. Apparently kukris are useful for decapitating chickens (as a prelude for making curry in a dustbin), but I haven’t tried that yet.
But the ‘Emergency’, as it was called, is not the subject of The Harmony Silk Factory – its focus is on the period of the imminent Japanese invasion in 1941 and, more particularly, on the difficult and not straightforward choices which that forced upon people. It was Tash Aw’s first novel, written back in 2005, and it won the Whitbread (which became the Costa and is now the Nero) First Novel Award. He has said that he wrote it because there wasn’t much written about Malaysia, but he has gone on to remedy that, since Malaysia has provided the focus for all his subsequent writing.
The period which he is writing about in The Harmony Silk Factory is one of ambiguity, and that ambiguity is reflected in the way Tash Aw tells his story, with three narrators. Reviewers suggest that they all give different versions of the same story, but that’s a lazy over-simplification. What they are in fact doing is to tell stories which happen to overlap. The purpose and focus of each of their individual stories is different; the historical moments in which their various testimonies are written also differ; and the timeframe which their stories cover are all different too. The end result is to maximise the sense of ambiguity, as if you are seeing the world which they describe through a series of lenses, none of which have the correct prescription for you, the reader. It is an odd sensation. The Guardian described this as a simple case of ‘unreliable narration’. But it’s not so much unreliable as partial and subjective, and designed to suggest that history is unknowable.
What is the subject of this unreliable narration? The first testimony comes from Jasper, who is determined to investigate the life of his father, ‘the infamous Chinaman called Johnny’, whom he describes as ‘a liar, a cheat, a traitor and a skirt-chaser. Of the very highest order’. In a life of dodgy dealings Johnny’s worst moment, his son claims, is when he betrayed his Communist Party comrades to the Japanese during their occupation of the peninsula. Jasper pieces his story together from multiple historical records – he was not, of course, around to witness much of his father’s life.
The second testimony comes from Snow, Jasper’s mother and Johnny’s (rather improbable) wife, who died on the day that Jasper was born. Whereas Johnny was a chancer with a dubious background (at least according to his son) Snow Soong came from a well-to-do family. It is not clear why she married Johnny. Did she take a fancy to him? Or did her family pressure her into taking him? Accounts differ. Snow’s testimony is entitled simply 1941 and consists of diary entries covering two months in that year, when she is married to Johnny but has fallen in love with Mamoru Kunichika, apparently a Japanese academic recently arrived in Malaya, but who after the invasion becomes the head of the Kempeitai (the Japanese secret police). The date given to this section is significant – in 1941 the Japanese had invaded Siam and were contemplating extending their reach down the Malaysian peninsula. You can feel the political background simmering away, although Snow does not seem aware of it. Why does a woman selling fruit suddenly appear on a deserted road through the jungle? Why does Kunichika want to get off that road so quickly? Why does Kunichika ask Snow leading questions about Johnny? But Snow ignores all that, just as she ignores the question of who Johnny really is. Instead her focus is on love, romance and Kunichika.
The final testimony is that of Peter Wormwood, who came across Johnny in Singapore before the war. He is writing in a care home somewhere in what has become Malaysia – he has never returned to Britain. He tells how he came to Singapore, fascinated by the idea of the Orient, and found Johnny reading Shelley in a bar. It’s a totally different picture of Johnny to that given to us by his son Jasper, who portrays him as a hard-bitten wheeler dealer without morals or scruples. But Peter’s narrative does not focus on Johnny – his focus as he writes in his care home is on the creation of a garden, and his historical focus back when he knew Johnny is on Snow, with whom he has fallen in love. His narrative ends with the revelation of who Jasper’s real father is – we have been led to suspect that it might be Kunichika and not Johnny. And that revelation gives shape to the novel, returning us to Jasper, with whom we had begun.
So the novel feels in one sense like the story of a love triangle (or is it a square, with four participants?), with Snow married to Johnny but pursuing Kunichika and being pursued by Peter. In another sense it is a historical and political story, set in the lead-up to the Japanese invasion of the Malaysian peninsula and complete with representative Chinese, Malay, English and Japanese characters. The story of Johnny’s betrayal of his Communist comrades is based on the very real massacre which took place in the Batu Caves in 1941, and there is a real sense of the wheels of politics and history whirring away as our characters concern themselves with matters of the heart.
Tash Aw has said that ‘I wanted to challenge myself to create a complex storyline that would take as much time to unravel as it would to create’. And he succeeds – there are multiple layers of complexity here. Is our concern love or is it politics and war? Is the focus really on understanding Johnny and on uncovering who he really was? Or is that just one among many concerns?
Even the author seems to feel that the complexity of his narrative is too much at times. Jasper’s narration occasionally becomes suspiciously omniscient, including dialogue which took place before Jasper was even born. And later, Peter seems to remember verbatim the words, spoken decades earlier, of Frederick Honey, a tin mine manager who accompanies Snow and Johnny on a strange trip which also included Kunichika and Peter Wormwood. Honey seems to have no obvious part in the plot but to be there solely to reveal to Peter (and so to the reader) what the trip is all about. Cutting through all the mysterious complexity Honey tells Peter that Snow is there ‘as bait for the Professor (Kunichika), who may or may not rise to accept this tasty morsel. He’s only interested in Johnny, that filthy commie guerrilla. The whole trip’s been arranged so that Kunichika can become best chums with his soon-to-be chief informer’. That moment took me aback. It felt as though a tasteful veil had been ripped away and the basic thrust of the novel laid bare in its most simple terms. Honey ends up dead shortly afterwards – and I can’t help thinking that it was the author who did it, since Honey’s narrative purpose had been achieved.
The potential problem is that you might feel that it isn’t really clear what the novel is about or where it is going. And although it ends with the revelation of Jasper’s true paternity it doesn’t feel as if the novel’s purpose from the beginning has been to follow a path towards making that discovery. The problem with complexity, perhaps, is that intriguing complication can become a messy and incomprehensible tangle. But for myself I enjoyed the ride – reading a novel which made the act of reading a conscious act requiring thought and consideration. it also made me realise that there might be more than one way of looking at the Malayan Emergency in which my father played a small (and very pacific) part as a sergeant in the Education Corps.
Note
If you want to read more fiction set in Malaysia try:
Anthony Burgess, A Malayan Trilogy, set in post-independence Malaya
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Somerset Maugham, The Casuarina Tree
J G Farrell, The Singapore Grip, which covers the Japanese invasion
Leslie Thomas, Virgin Soldiers, which is written from the point of view of a British soldier during the Emergency
And more recently, Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists, and other subsequent novels.
A writer reading 