A war story in a generic tropical colony

Set in what was then the Malayan Peninsula (now Malaysia) at the time of the Japanese occupation (1940s), unusually, the protagonist is a Eurasian, Cecily. Eurasians are a minority community in Malaysia, but in the time of the British occupation, they held certain positions of higher status amongst the locals, often as a reward for their loyalty to the white colonisers, which whom they wanted to associated themselves. Drawing on a tiny part of their Portuguese descent, Cecily’s family deem themselves better than other Asian compatriots, whiter. But Cecily is disillusioned early. Unlike her very pretty sister who married an officer and was taken to Britain, Cecily marries a local Eurasian man and is a housewife and mother of three. The plot is very much about how Cecily takes on an espionage role betraying the British, and the fall out consequently.

If the reader is hoping for an interesting setting and context in 1930s and 1940s Malaya, this is not the novel which will provide that. Although the author is Malaysian, the novel shows extremely limited engagement with the country and the locals, and is almost exclusively focused on the world of its protagonist, Cecily, the Eurasian. While this is no crime, what is a disappointment is how the novel seems to lack a certain integrity, almost as if the country, the Japanese occupation, this significant part of its history, was merely deployed to be a culturally interesting backdrop to dramatize Cecily’s life. The premise is already far-fetched enough – namely, that the famed story of how the Japanese overran a British occupied Malaya in mere weeks because the British expected an invasion from the south and positioned all their canons facing south, while the Japanese advanced from the north instead and so wrong footed the British – is supposedly all the brainchild of this Eurasian housewife, who knows nothing of strategy and was hardly a high-level agent or spy.

Cecily’s role was to collect scraps of information for a Japanese-British informant, Fujiwara – once plain Bingley Chan – who married a Chinese local woman, but was later promoted to General and loyal to the Japanese Emperor and Imperial Army. A dissatisfied housewife, and fascinated by Fujiwara, Cecily is easily recruited as a low-level spy of sorts, enjoying a sense of having a higher purpose and escaping the mundanities of her life by passing onto her lover, Fujiwara, such snippets of information as she could find. Cecily’s husband himself was hardly a high ranking official of any sort. The reader is expected to believe that Fujiwara discussed state secrets and politics with Cecily, then listened to ‘her’ idea of invading from the north and passed that on to higher authorities and so changed history – not only a far fetched notion, but rather insulting as far as Malayan history is concerned.

Most of the novel is played out in a place called Bintang, somewhere in Kuala Lumpur, supposedly. While it is fine to create a fictional place, there is no real sense of Kuala Lumpur in this novel, the context and placeness are completely lacking, simply omitted. There is no mention of landmarks, of well known spaces, of food (extraordinary for a Malaysian novel!), no mention of local race relations (again, so key in Kuala Lumpur and in Malaysia in general), no real sense that one is actually in a particular city or country – it comes across as being just some generic tropical, humid part of the world. The language seldom captured any Malaysian inflections of speech, and indeed, it was difficult to feel these characters were Malaysians/Malayan.

Not only does it draw blanks geographically, but temporally too. 1930s and 1940s Malaysia would have been characterised in certain ways by its lifestyles, its daily rhythms, its landscapes, its flora and fauna, its social hierarchies, its architecture, its access to facilities, its technology, and basically, everything which makes a place unique to itself and to its period. There is no sense of the history and the setting, which is part of what compromises the integrity of this novel. There is very little sense of how the Japanese occupation experience differed vastly from race to race, for example. Or how the British occupation also affected the racial groups very differently. Malaya then (and even now) is a country of migrants all negotiating their identity, sense of belonging, doing linguistic acrobatics, negotiating allegiances and loyalties…none of that was even hinted at. There seemed so little local knowledge about how Malaysians interact, what their concerns are, their attitudes…there was very little Malaysian presence, people or place. There is just a lot of generality about heat and humidity and smells, but no real sense of what Kuala Lumpur of Malaysia feels and looks like. Which is puzzling given the author is Malaysian.

Early on in the plot, we are told of teenaged boys disappearing from Bintang, and Abel, Cecily’s 15 year old son, is one of those who disappear. This is the device for the author to write a parallel story of how Abel was brought to Thailand to build the death railway, along with many other POWS and captured boys. Her account is another big disappointment; so many novels have already depicted this very place and time, and often, so well, so sensitively and in such good detail. This novel’s contribution is less than paltry, once again, it is almost insulting to history. It wants to show how Abel is suffering and surviving, but it is not even clear why this matters to the plot. It in no way is woven into the espionage part of the story, except for the fact that losing Abel is one of the many stresses of Cecily’s life. Perhaps it is an attempt to depict another part of the Japanese occupation, but it is a very poor depiction if so. And the portrayal overall of conditions during the Japanese occupation is exceptionally lacking in this novel, almost so lacking as to be insensitive and practically offensive.

This review could write realms about what is lacking and poor and lacking plausibility in this novel. However, the parts which were good were the parts which explained Cecily’s mindset and attitude. The writing is best when it is focused on Cecily and being critical of the Eurasian hero-worship of the white man.

There was Cecily’s increasing disillusionment with the British, a view that was at odds with her mother’s and her husband’s reverence. The older she got, the more she noticed the underachievement of the white men around her – third and fourth disinherited sons, failed soldiers, alcoholics, expelled by their families or their regiments and sent to far-flung places like the Malayan peninsula ion order to regain a modicum, of dignity for their lineage. And while here, in their weather-inappropriate wool suits, they marched around, stinking, she thought, with an air of unearned superiority, unless they spotted a particularly well-shaped set of local breasts, in which case their watery eyes would brighten.

There was the pinch of shame she felt twisting in her chest when she found herself sidestepped by a British wife at the shops or every time her husband came home thrilled by a crumb of validation he had received from a white colleague who could barely remember his name” (p22-23).

There is a lot of pointed criticism of the inferiority complex of the ‘white-adjacent’ Eurasians of Malaya:

She didn’t know how to explain to her daughter that even if they told themselves they were white-adjacent, even if they held in to the flecks of European in their veins, it meant nothing.

Gordon and Cecily’s mothers had hoped that the whiteness in their blood would superseded the brownness of the skin, that if they waited and served their British masters patiently enough, their European lineage, faint as it was, would be recognized by the white men, that they would be elevated above Malayans of other races” (p23).

It is not that this reader has any quarrel with the depiction of Cecily, which is reasonably plausible for most part; the reader’s bone to pick with the author is how Malayan history, and Malaya as a whole – its feel, its race relations, its culture, it locality, particularly in this difficult period of its Japanese occupation – was just utilised as little more than colourful backdrop, and lacked detail and care and precision, lacked verisimilitude, lacked integrity. It is not that the writing was awful, but the novel lacked depth of knowledge, careful research, and historical veracity. While not doubting the author’s good intentions, it is just not a novel that could be recommended, and indeed, should be carefully consigned to some dusty forgotten corner in some backroom.

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