Who: Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lanka-born Canadian poet and novelist. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards including the Governor General’s Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. His 1992 Booker winner, The English Patient, won the  Golden Man Booker Prize in 2018. Warlight is his latest novel, and it is longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018.

What: It is 1945 Britain. Siblings Nathaniel and Rachel Williams are told one day after breakfast that their parents will be moving to Singapore for their father to take up a new post at one of Unilever’s regional headquarters. They will  remain in Britain under the care of a family friend, whom they know as The Moth. Their father leaves first before their mother, Rose,  is to join him later. In the last few days with their mother, Nathaniel and Rachel — or Stitch and Wren, their mother’s nicknames for them — learn that Rose, code-named Viola (“Ours was a family with a habit for nicknames, which meant it was also a family of disguises”), may not have been entirely truthful with them.

Dropped hints of her wartime contributions with the Moth suggest a mercurial, can-do intelligence agent that belies her current guise as a quiet, retiring homemaker. These suspicions are validated when, upon her departure, the children discover her travelling trunk hidden in the cellar of their home. Effectively abandoned, the children then turn to the enigmatic Moth and his group of eccentrics including a former beekeeper, botanist and welterweight boxer known only as The Pimlico Darter.

Narrated by Nathaniel years later, a significant portion of the first part of the book has to do with his coming-of-age under the tutelage of these people, chiefly the Darter. The Darter, a former boxer and small-time greyhound smuggler and tout working the local racing grounds, introduces Nathaniel to the backwaters and byways of post-war London and engages his help in smuggling racing dogs from France on a modified mussel boat through the Thames. Then there’s Olive “Not Just an Ethnographer” Lawrence who was instrumental in plotting the Normandy landings of D-Day, and a spy haberdasher filling out the Moth’s motley crew responsible for overlooking the Williams siblings.

But there is intrigue afoot, and everything comes to a head one evening at the Bark Theatre when he and Rachel are kidnapped. Rose re-emerges to save the children, but the encounter does not end without loss. Rachel, still smarting from their abandonment, severs ties with her mother while Nathaniel, perhaps more sanguine in his personality, remains with Rose. The rest of the novel sees Nathaniel slowly unravelling more of his mother’s background while he comes to terms with his own history.

Why: Warlight is a story of memory: of the things we remember and the things we choose not to remember for the sake of self-preservation and of making sense of who we are. It is a story of the consequences of the choices we make and the consequences of the choices made for us, all taking place within the backdrop of a post-war world where intrigue remains the watchword for the day. Warlight is also a reminder that ‘truth’ is always a heavily edited narrative, and that competing narratives can result in antagonism and division.

The novelist Yiyun Li admits that she has a troublesome relationship with time as memories “tell more about now than then”. Memories are thus untrustworthy companions, especially as, Nathaniel says, “I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth… We order our lives with such barely held stories.” Nathaniel’s “barely held” stories, which make up the first third of the book, are remarkable, but are perhaps incomplete as there “was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river”.

The lack of continuity and the dramatic slowing of the momentum in the final two thirds of the book smothers the high adventure of the first third with nostalgia and sentimentality. Nathaniel takes a back seat, and the main characters seem to shrink into caricatures. But it is perhaps precisely because he consciously occludes himself from the narrative that we see Ondaatje’s world with greater acuity, where the world is lit with more than just warlight. But this clearer world is not necessarily a more enlightening one, nor it is particularly interesting one even though Nathaniel successfully pieces together his mother’s intelligence intrigues.

The Guardian’s Alex Preston describes the progression as a “knit into a work of fiction as rich, as beautiful, as melancholy as life itself, written in the visionary language of memory”, but more striking to me was the imbalance in the book. The shift in gears from first to second to third was jolting, as if Ondaatje could hardly wait to get done with the genre-fictionesque spy thriller to get back to slow, overwritten sepia-toned reminiscences of the past.

While the heart of the story is in the second and third parts of the book, it is the first part of the book where Ondaatje shows, unlike his previous writing, that he is no slouch in creating rich textured environments and characters, and pacey action sequences.

Verdict: While intriguing at times, the book feels imbalanced overall. (6.5/10)

Availability: Trade paperback, RM77.90

Special thanks to Times Distribution for an advance reading copy of the book. 

Who: Leïla Slimani is a Franco-Moroccan writer and journalist. Lullaby, or Chanson douce in the original French, is her second novel. In 2016, Chanson douce was awarded the Prix Goncourt. The story is based on the 2012 killings of the Krim siblings in New York. Lullaby was translated into English by Sam Taylor.

What: The cover of the book tells all: the baby is dead; it only took a few seconds. A grisly opening awaits on the first page. A mother has returned to her apartment. She finds her children dead and the nanny bleeding out from a self-inflicted wound. It is a parent’s worst nightmare.

The story then turns to parents Myriam and Paul Massè’s decision to hire a nanny. Myriam, a promising lawyer, had put her career on hold to be a full-time mother to Maya and Adam. But the joys of motherhood had soured to resentment over the years, and when an opportunity to resume her role as a legal eagle emerged, she made the difficult but perfectly understandable decision to put her children under care.

Enter Louise, an experienced nanny with with superb references and an almost preternatural ability to be helpful. She immediately becomes an indispensable member of the family going so far as to join them on their family vacations. But it quickly becomes apparent that Louise, for all her benevolence and proficiency with the children, is not the heaven-sent angel everyone assumes her to be.

Why: Slimani’s Lullaby is not a whodunnit, but a why-she-gone-and-done-it. Neither is it a work of redemption, but a visceral attempt at tying together seemingly disparate themes to provide an explanation.

The prose in the book is explosive and Sam Taylor’s translation greatly heightens the fraught tension in the book. Slimani’s dispassionate and clinical observations throughout — it is evident she has done some journalistic work — intensifies the atmospheric feelings of horror and foreshadowing: Yes, the reader is always waiting for the other (nanny’s) shoe to drop. And because we know she’d gone and done it from the beginning, every action, no matter how innocent, is tinged with murderous intent (or perhaps they were never innocent to begin with).

“Myriam doesn’t  know this, but Louise’s favourite game [with the children] is hide-and-seek. Except that nobody counts and there are no rules. The game is based on the element of surprise. Without warning, Louise disappears. She nestles in a corner and lets the children search for her. She often chooses hiding places where she can continue to observe them. She hides under the bed or behind a door and doesn’t move. She holds her breath.”

There are few surprises in this story, but Slimani nevertheless manages to create a compelling page-turner. Louise, despite her stabby madness, does elicit alternate feelings of sympathy and horror as more of her history is revealed. Lullaby, properly, is her story, her descent into madness and her devolution into a properly mechanistic creature who has lost the last vestiges of humanity.

Nevertheless there is a niggling sense that Slimani begs the question somewhat, and this may have to do with the “inverted-pyramid” reporting style of the book. The book opens with the headline — the “big news”: The children are dead and the nanny grievously hurt from a self-inflicted wound. We then go back to answer the next question: How did it come to this?

Myriam and Paul are modern, conscientious parents, and have been more than considerate and generous to the nanny. We conclude, early on, that Louise must either be comic-book evil or insane. But since this is not a comic book, we are really left with only insanity as the only explanation for her actions. Interestingly, this is not what the court concluded in the real-life Krim siblings case with their murderer-nanny Yoselyn Ortega deemed fit to stand trial (we never get to the trial phase in Slimani’s book so it may very well be the case that she receives the same judgement). Indeed, in the Ortega case, the judge, in pronouncing her sentence, described her as “pure evil”, thereby eliminating the latter fork of the evil/mad characterisation.

It’s by no means a vicious argument to say that a caregiver who murders her wards on the basis of unjustified beliefs is mad or evil, and we could say that Lullaby is really about the particular flavour of Louise’s articulation. It doesn’t take away from the Slimani’s accomplishments to say that we know off the bat that Louise must be mad or crazy or worse. But given the slippery nature of madness, perhaps I was looking for something for a bit more to explain the stabbiness.

Verdict: Probably shouldn’t read this if you’re a jumpy parent. The writing is sublime and the plot well-developed, but I have a feeling Slimani missed a trick although I’m not sure what. (7.5/10)

Availability: Paperback, RM47.50

Writing more than 400 years ago in a land and culture far removed from our own, the question is worth asking: Is Shakespeare, or has Shakespeare ever been, relevant to us? While the bard’s continued grip on the West can certainly be attributable to historicity and the need for cultural continuity — we have our own legends and stories here both local and carried upon the shoulders of our ancestors — can we make the same argument in all earnestness? Or perhaps Shakespeare is so inseparable from English literature that to read the English story is to doff one’s cap to him?

It is not within the remit of this article to question the validity of the claim, i.e. that “Shakespeare reveals a different face to different cultures and different people at different times”, but it is sufficient for our purposes to agree that Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets remain an integral part of our cultural imagination, even as far removed away as we are from Stratford-upon-Avon. Romeo and Juliet is still the love story par excellence, Hamlet remains the tragic existentialist, and Caesar’s Brutus the betrayer above all other betrayers, Judas notwithstanding.

It is these characters, these faces, these ideas —arguably so foundationally representative of the  human psyche — that keep the bard relevant. And it is these ideas also that have inspired a new generation of writers to reimagine and retell the stories in contexts that find greater resonance with the contemporary reader.

Enter the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which invites modern novelists to reimagine some of his most celebrated plays.

 

Dunbar by Edward St Aubyn
A reimagining of one of Shakespeare’s most well-read tragedies, King Lear, Dunbar is an excoriating novel for and of our times — an examination of power, money and the value of forgiveness.

Henry Dunbar, the once all-powerful head of a global media corporation, is not having a good day. In his dotage he hands over care of the corporation to his two eldest daughters, Abby and Megan, but as relations sour, he starts to doubt the wisdom of past decisions. Now imprisoned in Meadowmeade, an upscale sanatorium in rural England, with only a demented alcoholic comedian as company, Dunbar starts planning his escape. As he flees into the hills, his family is hot on his heels. But who will find him first, his beloved youngest daughter, Florence, or the tigresses Abby and Megan, so keen to divest him of his estate? (RM52.90)

 

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson
The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s “late plays” that tells the story of a king whose jealousy results in the banishment of his baby daughter and the death of his beautiful wife. His daughter is found and brought up by a shepherd on the Bohemian coast, but through a series of extraordinary events, father and daughter, and eventually mother too, are reunited.

In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale, we move from London, a city reeling after the 2008 financial crisis, to a storm-ravaged American city called New Bohemia. Her story is one of childhood friendship, money, status, technology and the elliptical nature of time. Written with energy and wit, this is a story of the consuming power of jealousy on the one hand, and redemption and the enduring love of a lost child on the other. (RM59.90)

 

Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is retold as Hag-Seed by master storyteller, Margaret Atwood.

Felix is at the top of his game as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other: Not only will it boost his reputation, it will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. He’s also plotting revenge.

After 12 years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall? Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s play of enchantment, retribution, and second chances leads us on an interactive, illusion-ridden journey filled with new surprises and wonders of its own. (RM55.90)

 

Shylock is My Name by Howard Jacobson
Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson brings his singular brilliance to this modern re-imagining of one of Shakespeare’s most unforgettable characters: Shylock

Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and profound interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge.

While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice’s “betrayal” of her family and heritage — as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field — Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter’s rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock’s demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson’s insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent — a drama which Jacobson himself considers to be “the most troubling of Shakespeare’s plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging”. (RM59.90)

 

New Boy by Tracy Chevalier
Tracy Chevalier brings Shakespeare’s harrowing drama of jealousy and revenge, Othello, to a 1970s era elementary school playground.

Arriving at his fifth school in as many years, diplomat’s son, Osei Kokote, knows he needs an ally if he is to survive his first day — so he’s lucky to hit it off with Dee, the most popular girl in school. But one student can’t stand to witness this budding relationship: Ian decides to destroy the friendship between the black boy and the golden girl. By the end of the day, the school and its key players — teachers and pupils alike — will never be the same again. Chevalier’s powerful drama of friends torn apart by jealousy, bullying and betrayal will leave you reeling. (RM52.90)

 

Macbeth by Jo Nesbo
Set in the 1970s in a run-down, rainy industrial town, Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth centres around a police force struggling to shed an incessant drug problem. Duncan, chief of police, is idealistic and visionary, a dream to the townspeople but a nightmare for criminals. The drug trade is ruled by two drug lords, one of whom — a master of manipulation named Hecate — has connections with the highest in power, and plans to use them to get his way.

Hecate’s plot hinges on steadily, insidiously manipulating Inspector Macbeth: the head of SWAT and a man already susceptible to violent and paranoid tendencies. What follows is an unputdownable story of love and guilt, political ambition, and greed for more, exploring the darkest corners of human nature, and the aspirations of the criminal mind. (Trade paperback, RM79.90)

Say hello to our new guest contributor, Eugene Lim. He reviews a debut novel set in Singapore. 

Who: A journalist who was born and raised in the UK, Fiona Mitchell’s debut novel, The Maid’s Room, is based on her experiences living in Singapore for almost three years. She is winner of the 2015 Frome Short Story Competition and has also been shortlisted three times for the Bristol Short Story Prize.

What: The Maid’s Room chronicles the lives of three women in dire circumstances, but for altogether different reasons. Jules is newly-arrived to Singapore from the UK, desperate to conceive a baby and struggling to accustom herself to her new social circle of privileged expatriate wives whose children are left in the care of their respective maids. Dolly is a youthful, attractive woman from the Philippines who is determined to do whatever it takes to provide for a decent upbringing for her daughter Mallie, and Dolly’s older sister Tala is an experienced hand at navigating the life of a foreign domestic worker.

All three are confronted with the existence of Vanda, a mysterious blogger with an apparent vendetta against foreign maids whose blog becomes a sensation for its supposed exposé chronicling their shenanigans and cautioning against giving them basic human rights. It is a story of sadness, poignancy and redemption.

Why: The Maid’s Room is an eye-opener into our casual neglect of the welfare of a fixture in modern, middle-class Malaysian life: the foreign live-in help. In recent times we have had ample news of the mental, physical and sexual abuse of foreign maids by their employers. This book serves as a wake-up call to many, highlighting the fact that these are in fact, people with needs, emotions, fears and hopes; people who are compelled to spend years away from their loved ones in order to provide for them.

The literary style isn’t very refined; but then again, this book is meant to reflect its characters, not romanticise them. This book was a tough read as time and again, I have been compelled to pause and admit distastefully that I have borne witness to live-in domestic helpers being subjected to similar experiences as Dolly and Tala, and merely shrugged it off.

This is a humorous and heart-breaking tale about the daily life of someone who struggles to be heard.

Verdict: This is a highly captivating story that I would recommend, one that serves as a cautionary tale against indifferent neglect and taking people for granted. (8/10)

Availability: Paperback, RM49.90

Thank you Pansing Distribution for a review copy of the book. 

By guest contributor Sarah Loh 

Who: Prayaag Akbar is a writer and journalist. A former deputy editor of Scroll, his award-winning reporting and commentary have examined various aspects of marginalisation in India. He studied at Dartmouth College and the London School of Economics. He lives in Mumbai with his wife and their cat, and works as a consulting editor with Mint, a leading Indian newspaper. Leila is his debut novel.

What: In a near-future city in India, society is fixated on the concept of purity and people revert to communal segregation based on caste. Divided by walls, communities are guarded by brutish men known as the Repeaters and permissions are needed to enter any one sector. In this bleak world of oppressive patriarchy and ostracism, Shalini searches for her lost daughter Leila, who was taken from her 16 years ago. This is a story of suffering and redemption and what it truly means to be human.

Why: Prayaag Akbar’s writing is simple yet engaging. The story starts off slow but once the pace picks up, it becomes a real page-turner. Shalini is a compelling and flawed character where you might find yourself first feeling bad for her, and then realising that she probably did not deserve your full sympathy. That said, she is not an unlikable character and you will most likely root for her as she searches for her daughter.

It is undeniable that this story is very much like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Female narrator? Check. Communal segregation based on social class? Double check. Non-linear narrative that jumps between past and present? Triple check. That said, Leila isn’t a mere copycat story. The dystopia in Leila is more realistic and mirrors what real-world India could become if India’s social issues persist (i.e. prohibition of inter-caste marriages; the widening gap between the rich and the poor; the oppression of women). And it is this social realism that makes Leila a much more disturbing read.

Best/Worst Line(s): To her I am an emptiness, an ache she cannot understand but yearns to fill. No. I have left more, a glimmer at least. The blurred outline of a face. A tracery of scent. The weight of fingertips on her cheek. The warmth of her first cradle, my arms.

Verdict: Dystopian or speculative, Leila is an enjoyable story that sometimes hits a little too close to home. I was just a tad bit disappointed with the ending, but I suppose it works for this story. (9/10)

Availability: Hardback, RM89.90

Special thanks to Times Distribution for a review copy of the book. 

We’re delighted to have a new guest contributor, Emily Ding, write for us. Here’s her first review. 

Who: A few years ago, Tom Rachman — who used to work as a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Rome — published The Imperfectionists, his debut novel/linked short stories about a bunch of hacks working at a English-language paper in Rome, to critical acclaim. That was my introduction to his work, and because of that book I would read anything else he writes. He also wrote another novel, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, and Basket of Deplorables, a collection of short stories inspired by Trumpian America.

What and Why: If, like me, you saw Mother! or Phantom Thread before picking up The Italian Teacher, you might initially be a little put off by its opening pages depicting a bullishly charming painter whose wife and son live in his shadow. But keep at it. It’ll very soon become clear that Bear Bavinsky is not actually the central character in this story; it’s his son, Charles “Pinch” Bavinsky, who, through boyhood, manhood and old age, never shakes off his need for his father’s approval. And the only way to win Bear’s approval is to feed his ego as an artist, even as the man is, with the passing of time and the fickleness of taste, relegated to a once-been.

Having grown up so close to fame with a celebrated father, Pinch is a young man with “needy ambitions” — expressed more as a desire to be seen and loved by his father and the world than any self-directed sense of purpose or impulse. When his budding skills as a painter —imitating his father’s work: studying parts of the human body in isolation — are abruptly dismissed, Pinch decides that he will write a biography of Bear Bavinsky instead. He can already picture it: The book will become critically acclaimed, and he will establish himself as an art critic. And yet, how can he, when everything he reveres and loathes is determined by what Bear reveres and loathes? Pinch is the guy who clings to what the people he worships say and do, and when they disavow what they’ve said or done he feels betrayed, because he never had the strength of his own convictions in the first place. Equally, his ambition sullies his friendships and relationships: He sees people for the figures of importance they might become — which would reinforce his own importance — rather than who they really are.

In less adept hands, Pinch might come across as a little insufferable, but Rachman has a knack — similarly displayed in his debut, The Imperfectionists — for exposing his characters’ foibles with clear-eyed tenderness, so that we always recognise, often uncomfortably, bits of ourselves in them. “Nobody likes to be understood without warning,” reads one line in the book.

Ultimately, does Pinch ever fulfil his dreams for his life? Does he ever make peace with being the seemingly second-rate son of a famous man? In attempting to answer these questions, Rachman asks so many more: What’s the point of making art: to create something good or how it makes you feel? What’s more important: a rich interior life or a life of public note? Can art and ambition and fame (itself a kind of love) fill the absence of real human love? I’ll leave you to find out, and just say that a twist — a secret act of rebellion — comes more than halfway through the book, so wait for it. If at other times the novel seems to be wading through the motions of a man’s entire life, with episodes of importance yet unclear, it’s because at heart, this is what the story is about: how to build a life — hopefully with a little bit of decency, dignity and accountability, whatever becomes of it.

Verdict: I wonder if the structure might have been played with a little bit to avoid a straight chronology, but otherwise, it’s funny, desperate, satirical and moving, all at once. It’s the sort of book that will make you ask yourself questions after you’ve put it down. (7/10)

Availability: In-store soon

Special thanks to Pansing Distribution for a review copy of the book.