ECHOES of SILENCE by Chuah Guat Eng Holograms, 343 Pages

ECHOES OF SILENCE By Chuah Guat Eng Holograms, 343 pages

Original version of Review by Jun Mo (a writer based in London) which appeared in Far Eastern Economic Review, November 9th, 1995

Chuah Guat Eng's first novel more than satisfies our expectations of that suave literary species, the "unputdownable" -- but it is much more than a stylish thriller.

A murder is committed in the fronded depths of a beautifully created spell of jungle and plantation somewhere off the beaten track in Malaysia.

As we follow the first-person narrator's progress in feeling for the murder clues, we get clues of another ilk as well, of such complex quality that as the plot thickens, the narrative blooms. Soon we are led into a parallel realm of discovery, filled with the rich reverberations of personal odyssey; we almost forget the murder, and observe the dovetailing at the end with bemusement.

Is this overstating the case? In the author's temperate jungle, the murder is bloodless in spite of the blood; the victim with her long golden hair and white trouser suit resembles "Barbie Doll", the sensitive little inspector grows roses, the townplanning is that of "Legoland", and the detection is tidak apa or laid-back and tolerates the intervention of some twenty years.

And we are on to the fact that the thriller structure, which the author wields with so light a touch, comes away in one tug as a stage prop, a play within a play.

But there is yet another, still more seductive technique in the novel. Listen to the opening sound of Chapter One:

In March 1970, as a direct result of the May 1969 racial riots, I left Malaysia. I had only one objective: to find a safe, orderly place to live in. A place where I could sink into obscurity and, as a tiny minority of one or at most two, never present a threat to anyone. I was eighteen years old.

Germany, when I first set eyes on the country, seemed to be that place. It was the beginning of spring and the snow was still on the ground…

Read as political statement, this is enigmatic, over the top, and does not quite answer to anything else in the book. But it is perfect as a voice-over against a travelling background of snowy Bavaria… a simulation of the cinema's simulation of the novel's interiority. Moving the focus, the alternative life-form of the cinema or The Box subtly distorts from time to time the flow of the elegant novelistic prose.

But the protagonist's wish for a quiet life is disrupted by events, and soon, Europe fades out as the Templeton estate fades in, a sort of personalised Raj in Malaysia existing in a small time-warp, side by side with real pig dirt on an indigent Chinese farm in a child's experience, and an almost emblematic woodcut rendering of passion, suffering and sobriety in the Malay servant's quarters.

Watercolour etching, woodcut, cinema -- a novel of protean form, then, more postmodern than at first appears, in which the author accesses the world's imagination through two or more of its fondest habits, the thriller and the film. And then gives it a lot more.

A potted guide to the novel might nudge the reader towards the Portrait of the Artist as a Woman and the Portrait of the Artist as a Eurasian, i.e. cultural Eurasian. But for our purposes, it is enough to note that our thriller structure has not come clean away, but is irremediably stuck to certain images central to the novel, which shades into themes, meanings and suchlike, the most haunting being muteness and orphanhood -- the mother who speaks the perfect mono-English of an orphanage run by European nuns and who cannot make contact, the lovely mute girl who lives through the warm- toned sensibilities of father and son -- till the thriller finally extricates itself from the round world of the real characters and shows us the cartoon: parenting and unparentedness, the parent in the child and the child in the parent.

These are not props of narration but metaphor, the features of an inward landscape.

Which also constitutes the brilliantly original and only answer in the novel to the quest for the meaning of May '69, discussed in the beginning and then let go:

Besieged and beleaguered but emotionally unable to take sides, we came face to face with the misfortune of being Chinese without feeling particularly Chinese, in what suddenly appeared to be an anti-Chinese world. For a certain kind of English-educated person, "westernised not by choice but by default", the effect of May '69 was cultural orphanhood, and it is the solving of this cultural conundrum that is the real detection work of the novel, and subtly draws the reader on.

The novel's solution cannot be told here. And there is much in it with which the reader may take issue. But the prize can be told: a glimpse on the author's terms into the multicultural legend of our society, rarely seen in literature in English since Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid (1976). The diversity of peoples is indigenous to the mind of the Malaysian, but a shy chimaera to approach in art.

Yet in the end it is not even this which makes it the most accomplished Malaysian novel to date, a new and cultured voice, in a society in which fiction has basically taken its own sweet time, for all the plethora of talent demonstrated in the short story form, and the passionate communally sourced novels of K.S. Maniam and others.

It is the created world of the novel, which leaves the reader with a definite feeling of depth, weight, sorrow and maturity, caused by the passing of time, the strain of events, birth and death, the sense of life, of growth, which gives to a society the gift of seeing itself, of phrasing its experience, of recording itself at the level of the massive landscape of culture and spirit without which politics must fail.

Original version of Review by Jun Mo (a writer based in London) which appeared in Far Eastern Economic Review, November 9th, 1995