Ava is a young Irish woman who manages to get out of Ireland by taking up teaching English to children in Hong Kong. She has no vacation for teaching and very little interest in Hong Kong, but manages to be part of an expatriate circle where most of the community are very affluent, particularly in comparison with Ava. Julian, a rich banker who likes Ava’s company, lets her live in his apartment rent-free, enabling her to move out of shabbier, shared accommodation and enjoy the trappings of a high end lifestyle. When travelling abroad for work, Julian even leaves Ava his AmEx card to use. They are sleeping together but insist they are not an item (sleeping together is almost seen as just a pleasant activity or past time for them, not a commitment). Ava is obsessed with Julian at first, wanting him to want her more in order to give her some leverage in a relationship where she feels she is nothing more than a whim to him; she is not necessarily in love with him, but she is seeking security.
Although there is a lot of internal monologue and personal angst and navel gazing in the novel, the witty writing style keeps it relatively amusing, particularly the first half. Ava takes pains to stress her Irishness, in contrast to Englishness or Britishness:
’Lah’ for emphasis – no lah, sorry lah – wasn’t English. I saw no difference between that and Irish people putting ‘sure’ in random places, it served a similar function sure, but that wasn’t English either. English was British.
p7
She makes further amusingly couched distinctions:
“She [Julian’s supposed wife] is Catholic – in the English recusant aristocrat sense, not the Irish poverty sense […]” (p22).
“Tall English buildings looked like tall English prisons, and when you said that to an English person they thought you meant their prisons were lovely, too” (p175).
The author who herself read at Oxford, is able to laugh at herself:
I asked him where he’d lived before Hong Kong, and he said he’d read history in Oxford. People who’d gone to Oxford would tell you so even when it wasn’t the question.
p3
Ava’s observations or social satire comments ring out very authentically and wittily:
Joan often made me stay behind to ‘help her’ write vocabulary lists. Un Hong Kong English, ‘helping someone do something’ could mean you did it and they did not assist. Joan was fond of this usage.
p18
There are many more extremely good observations about the use of Hong Kong English (for e.g. ‘I go already’ to mean ‘I went’, and other such struggles with tenses and the second language interference from Cantonese and/or Mandarin.) It is just a pity these fascinating observations about Hong Kong or Hong Kong English are just tiny little snippets, whereas so much of the novel focused on Ava focusing on herself. One cannot help feeling Dolan’s commentary about on Hong Kong or expatriate society or the Irish abroad perhaps would be a more interesting focus in the novel – most things are more interesting than Ava’s insecurities, inadequacies, and personal failings she obsesses about but does not intend to address. As she tells her brother,
“’I’m not nice to Julian,’ I said. ‘ He doesn’t love me and I feel like that means there’s something wrong with me, so then I want to believe the problem is actually him. We laugh a lot, but I’m a horrible person when I’m with him. I want to make him feel as bad as I do’”
p173
When Julian goes to London for an extended period of time (some months), Ava continues to stay in his apartment. Very soon after he leaves, she takes up with a Anglicized Hong Kong Chinese woman, called Edith. Edith works in a law firm and comes from a rich family, was at boarding school in England, and although technically a local in Hong Kong, definitely belongs to the expatriate circle. Ava starts sleeping with and dating Edith, knowing she is deceiving Julian, but not addressing the issue even though she thinks she is doing wrong. She seems rather inept at handling both her relationships with Julian and Edith: When Julian is just within days of returning to Hong Kong, Ava accidentally sends a text message to Julian with information about her relationship with Edith, which she had intended to delete (one of her ‘therapeutic drafts’, but sent instead, and he writes back a nonchalant reply, seeming unperturbed. Although Ava had not intended to tell Edith Julian is returning to Hong Kong, she blurts it out without context and unnecessarily,
’ By the way, Julian’s back next week.’ I’m an idiot. I had no idea why I’d just said that. Probably it was that I’d told Tom, I’d keep putting it off. Once I told someone I’d do something, I always did the opposite.
p174
It begins to sound like Ava is contrary for the sake of being contrary. Or else, she is naturally self-destructive, for example, when Edith is castigating her,
I wanted her to say it all I wanted there to be nothing left and to have my deficiencies out where I could see them.
p176
Ava clearly illogically but compellingly believes that if she pre-emptively self-hates, this will ward of disaster (though it is never clear what disaster). As is pointed out to Ava in the novel, she does not allow people to love her or get close to her because she is so afraid of being unlovable that she does all she can to set out to prove she is unlovable, just so she can have the satisfaction of having predicted it correctly, rather than risk having this shown to her by others.
The novel grows progressively less and less interesting, as Ava’s convoluted reasoning continues to go in the same circles and gets her (and the reader!) nowhere, it becomes just about watching Ava obsess over the two relationships in her life while narcissistically paying little attention to any other aspects of her life. Be warned the ending has no closure and goes nowhere either. It was not at all a bad read, it had many lovely little quirky observations sprinkled here and there, and the writing was strong and fluent, but Ava’s initially comical self-awareness and angst lose their ability to amuse, and if the second half of the novel is saved from tedium, is it because the writing is strong enough to keep one turning the pages. Would love to read something else by this author, who has undoubted talents of observation, social satire, a natural knack with narrative – and as long as it does not over-focus on a single, anxiety-ridden, limited protagonist in her self-constricted little mental world.
For another take, see Susan’s review of Exciting Times
Recent Comments