:1:
We start with the first volume of Burgess’s ‘Malayan’ trilogy, the complete set of which was later published under the Tennysonian title (this was the edition I read it in) The Long Day Wanes.
It seems a little feeble noting that it is a very good novel, since this was the book that launched the career of one of 20th-century Britain’s best novelists. It is, however, a very good novel. The thing is: it's good in unexpected ways.
The book is based on Burgess’s own experiences as a teacher at an elite school in Kuala Kangsar, located in the western portion of modern Malaysia (what was then the ‘Federated Malay States’). Burgess puts himself into Time for a Tiger as the, by AB-fictional-standards, rather vanilla character Victor Crabbe. Lynne Burgess is there as Crabbe’s wife Fenella, blonde and a bit blowsy, fond of a drink and frequently dissolving into tears. Fenella Crabbe is the only female character, (a few shrewish Muslim wives aside, covered very glancingly: plus Crabbe’s mistress Rahimah, a ‘dance-hostess’ at a local kedai, or bar, present only on the margins of this story), which tends to throw into relief the thin way in which AB characterizes women. Not that Crabbe is given much more roundedness. Crabbe features in the two successor books as well, so we might say that his characterization achieves a greater density and believeability as the trilogy goes on. But taking this novel on its own, as we are entitled to do, and knowing a fair bit about Burgess’s own life, it was hard for Crabbe to come over as anything more than a cipher. He is given one Major Inflection, characterisation-wise: back in England he crashed the car he was driving into a frozen river. He survived but his passenger, his first, wife, did not. The novel's implication is that he has fled to the far side of the world, away from ice and cold into the sweltering tropics, with his new wife to escape the guilt of this backstory (‘at the inquest he had been exonerated from all blame, and the coroner had condoned with him all too eloquently and publicly’ [40]). But guilt cannot be escaped, of course. Crabbe is unhappy; he is now unable to drive, or bathe. He drinks. He neglects his highly-strung wife, who weeps that she hates the country and yearns only to go back to England. Even his extra-marital affair is construed in terms of the trauma in his past:
In a sense, infidelity to one’s second wife was an act of homage to the first. His dead wife was in all women. Pointless to moon about, as his father had done, hugging a memory, putting flowers on the grave, decking them with the brine of self-pity. That was necrophily. He had learned a lot from his father. The body of his own wife had been burnt and dispersed in vapour, had become atoms suspended in air or liquid, breathed in or drained down A memory had no significance. History was not memory but a living pattern. [42]This finesses a Stephen-Daedalus-like dead mother into Crabbe’s background, in that Joycean sense of a decaying corpse that will not quit itself of the scene as it must do, and then links it (more-or-less subtly) to the situation in Malaysia—the process of decolonisation embodied by the Malayan Emergency itself. Britain the deceased parent, the removal of whose decaying corpse is needful, a circumstance discussed by several characters through the novel. Burgess goes on, dilating on this question of sexual infidelity, mortality and guilt:
I married again to quieten my nerves. I think it was a mistake now, but it was a natural one. Perhaps that’s where this sense of guilt is really coming from. It’s not been fair to her. The remembered dead wife and the palpable living wife must, to some extent, to identified. … The dead woman was brought to life and it was not fair, it was unnatural, to give life to the dead. [43]A handful of vividly rendered and variously eccentric minor characters aside, there are only two other main figures in the novel, both oriented around Fenella. One is Nabby Adams, an alcoholic colonial police sergeant of enormous height, originally from the north of England. The way Burgess gets under the skin of Adams’s craving for alcohol is completely believable and really rather brilliantly done. The way he can’t wake up properly without a bottle of beer (he prefers his beer warm: iced beer strikes him as flavourless and ‘effeminate’, and besides makes his bad teeth hurt). The way he needs a second at breakfast. How he structures his day around getting to his next drink. The way he buys small bottles and hides them in his enormous hands. Alcohol is expensive in this predominantly Muslim country, and Adams is already indebted to the hilt at all the local, mostly Chinese-run, bars and clubs. He does all the mean, shaming things an alcoholic does to score: cadging money, stealing, making promises he will never keep, everything judged by the short-term horizons of the next drink only. Burgess renders shabby with a kind of genius, and the scenes with Adams are excellent. The other is a Sikh police constable called Alladad Khan. Trapped in a miserable marriage, scolded by his wife, unhappy with his new baby, Khan has long adored Fenella from a distance.
The initial set up, plotwise, concerns a car. An Englishman in the colonial office, looking to return home, wants to sell his motor. Nabby Adams, with Alladad Khan’s help, secretly nobbles the engine, buys the car cheap, fixes the engine and sells it on to Crabbe at a profit, which Adams instantly spends on booze. Since Crabbe is too phobic to drive after his accident, he hires Khan as driver, which brings the Sikh closer to the object of his passion. Crabbe, meanwhile, is in trouble at his school: the headmaster, a snivelly individual called Boothby, hates him and believes him to be a troublemaker. Crabbe, sympathetic to the movement for Malay independence, teaches history to his boys in ways that Boothby considers insurrectionist, even treasonable. Meanwhile the Communist guerrillas whose incursions have made much of the countryside no-go have infiltrated the school. Crabbe becomes certain that something big is being planned for sports day. Boothby snarkily dismisses his suspicions.
But although the novel sets itself up as a specie of conventional narrative, it simply doesn’t pay out on the reader’s investment in any conventional way. We expect the love-triangle of Crabbe, Fenella and Crabbe’s mistress Rahimah to generate spicy drama, and for this to intensify as it becomes a love-quadrilateral with Khan's seduction of Fenella. None of this happens. Crabbe breaks up with Rahimah almost as soon as the story has begun. In a sub-plot the abandoned woman bribes the house servant (a flamboyantly camp gay man called Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh) to slip a love philtre into Crabbe’s gin and tonic. This story simply peters out; the philtre seems to have no effect and the novel ends with Rahimah effectively promoted to the position of mistress of the Raja himself. Meanwhile Khan, finally becoming close to Fenella, discovers that he doesn’t want to have sex with her after all; he just wants to sit on the verandah of the Crabbe’s house with her, talking.
The curious thing was that, now, Alladad Khan had no further desire to win the lady’s heart. The two would sit on the veranda, talking interminably in broken Malay and broken English, and Alladad Khan began to see at last what was the relationship he desired. It was rather complicated. He, alone, was seeking others who were alone. He was the only Khan for many states around, who had come here, an exile, to live among alien races…. Alladad Khan saw in Fenella Crabbe also an exile, cut off from her country, cut off from the white community. [130]Time for a Tiger is a 200-page novel, and for the first 160 of those pages nothing very much happens. Adams and Khan spend a lot of time at the Crabbes' house. There are some skilfully written set-pieces—most notably a trip into the jungle, in which Adams and Khan persuade the Crabbes to drive out and see some aboriginal culture: a rainstorm is superbly described, as is the underwhelming, grubby little village that is their destination and the anti-climax of the native festival. On the return trip the car breaks down. And mostly what the novel does is create a sense of atmosphere: the heat and insects, the bustle and crowds, the cat’s-cradles of interracial tensions and frictions, the decay of the old imperial model, the Communist guerrillas in the jungle a constant threat. The book’s titular ‘tiger’ is, of course, the popular Malayan Breweries Limited beer, ‘time for a tiger’ being their advertising slogan. But Burgess’s occasional references to the distant sound of tigers howling in the jungle remind us that the title's time is also an historical time, a to-come that belongs to the native animals, and to their predatory human avatars, rather than to the white-skinned interlopers. [Burgess published the novel before the end of the Malayan Emergency, and wasn’t to know that the insurgency would prove unsuccessful. Indeed, it strikes me as puzzling that comparing and contrasting the British handling of Communist revolution in Malaysia and the US handling of the same thing in the very similar landscapes of Vietnam is not more often undertaken by historians and cultural critics.]
The last forty-pages rather abruptly wake-up to the expectations of conventional plotting. Lots suddenly happens in a short space. Khan is driving the Crabbes back to the city in time for the school sport’s day when their car is ambushed by Communist soldiers: they get past the road-block, but Khan is shot in the arm. Adams, out of cash, buys a beer from a kedai with a lottery ticket he finds in his wallet. The Chinese bar owner is happy to take the ticket in lieu of money, because the numbers can be arranged into a magic square, something extremely auspicious to the Chinese way of looking at things. Adams goes back to the mess with his beer, but grows suspicious at the eagerness with which the bar accepted the ticket. He convinces himself that they—somehow—know it to be a winner. He marches angrily back into the bar to demand the ticket’s return. The bar owner, unwilling to give up so lucky a number, palms Adams off with another ticket, whose numbers are far less harmonically disposed. Adams, who can’t remember the numbers on the original ticket anyway, accepts this. The twist is that this latter ticket proves to be the winning one. The novel ends with Adams suddenly wealthy. He gives the ticket to Crabbe for safe keeping, and Crabbe uses it to supply his hated headmaster Boothby (who has, in the interim, effectively sacked him) with a nasty shock, pretending the winnings to be his own. Khan, now regarded as a hero, is promoted to sergeant and finds life goes more easily with his wife. Adams gives the Crabbes ten percent of the $350,000 he has won. The last scenes take place in a flooded Kuala Hantu, rains having caused the river to burst its banks.
I quite liked the hockey-stick shape of this narrative, actually, although it is certainly ungainly, structurally speaking. The slow build is absorbing and interpellates the reader into Burgess’s effectively worldbuilt Malaysia very nicely. AB is nonpareil in reproducing the idiolects and distinctive phrasal tics of his characters: Adams’s north-country, his superior Flaherty’s irishry, upper class English stiffness, Boothby’s snarkiness and proneness to yawning (‘Awwwwwww’), the formal elegance of Urdu and Malay (longer speeches of this are rendered as English, although the novel is also liberally supplied with untranslated phrases and terms from the latter). Lots of little touches come nicely to life: the way Khan’s wife will permit all manner of erotic interplay but not the, as she sees it, pornographic western perversity of kissing on the lips; the way Adams’ dog is called ‘Cough’, because its previous owner was always shouting at it for getting under his feet (Burgess reuses this ‘fuck-off’ joke in the Enderby books). Sex saturates the novel’s sensibility, but so does booze, and the two are presented, really, as incompatible with each other. At one point Nabby Adams recalls the erotic adventures of his youth, in England and India, whilst reflected blithely that his alcohol craving has wiped away all desire in that direction. The Crabbes appear to have a sexless marriage; Khan and Fenella’s friendship is chaste; Crabbe puts away his mistress early on; Khan’s wife spends much of the novel in another country.
In one sense the novel’s true love is language itself, a statement that applies (I’d say) pretty much across the board in AB's fiction. Just on the level of description, Burgess revels in his fresh command of the Joycean fecundity of his linguistic powers. Then there are the games he plays. Malayan is integrated into the texture of the novel as a way of evoking the flavour of living in a polyglot country. But it is also the vehicle for a variety of bawdy puns and in-jokes. Andrew Biswell records some of these in his (definitive) The Real Life of Anthony Burgess:
The River Lanchap (‘masturbation’); the Iblis Club (‘Iblis the Devil’); Negeri Dahaga (‘state or province of great thirst’); Mr Mahalingam (whose name means ‘large penis’). [Biswell, 194]‘This kind of semi-encrypted bawdiness is a recurring feature of Burgess’s novels from first to last’ Biswell notes. This, though, is not the end of it. A major town in Enemy in the Blanket is called Kenching, Malay for ‘piss’. In that novel a student rally takes place at ‘Tahi Panas’ (‘hot diarrhoea’); in Tiger, Adams runs his various bar tabs through his mind:
Lim Kean Swee $470’Cheese in Eye’ is English slang for smegma; and that last name, there, hardly even counts as a double-entendre. Let’s call it a single-entendre. Perhaps this kind of thing strikes you as juvenile. I disagree. I like the way it codes ‘conventional’ and official narratives as always interpenetrated by the unspeakable and the undignified; it fits the schoolboy context of much of the novel, and it’s funny in a Joycean or Shakespearean manner. I also thinks it registers Burgess's sense of puns working the other way across the grain of languages, as that (for instance) 'Malaya' includes in English the bawdy implication of having sex with ('laying') your 'ma'.Your mileage may vary.
Chee Sin Hye $276
Wun Fatt Tit $128 [175]
It stands in interesting relation to the other main buried structure of meaning Burgess has coded into the book. I'm talking about Eliot’s The Waste Land, which acts as a kind of structuring principle of the whole. This is evident in specific reference that characters make, as when Fenella reads the whole of the poem aloud to Khan. He doesn't understand most of it, but approves the final Datta, Dayadhvam. Damyata. ('He says he understands that bit, Mrs Crabbe', Adams tells her. 'He says that's what the thunder says' [133]). Burgess drops lines from the poem and other references into his text ('"What, are you here?"' [167]), and finishes with a flood after a long dry seasons because that's how Eliot finishes his poem. I suppose we might think this pretentious, at least in a way that calling your fictional river 'Wanking' (a fairly authentic-sounding Eastern name, come to think of it) isn't.
:2:
Let's start at the end. Why The Waste Land, except to show off that Burgess is Very Well Read? Eliot's poem, famously, is 'about' the sense of national and personal desolation that followed the First World War, figured (we can be retrospective about this: we've all read The Four Quartets) as unfulfilled spiritual yearning. The catastrophe has come and gone, the new world is waiting in the wings but has not yet been born, and in this parched interlude life carries on denuded of meaning. Burgess shifts the catastrophe from World War 1 to British Colonialism without distorting the underlying logic very much, and picks up on the way Eliot mixes high registers and demotic, throws in quotations left and right and centre and stirs it all with multilingual phrases and terms. Then there are occasional parallels: Adams lives bibulously inside the pub monologue from part 2, right down to his bad teeth ('get yourself some teeth; you have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,/He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you') and doomy sense that we need to HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. Fenella's tremulous exchanges with Crabbe are of a my nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me style, and the final sections resoundingly pay out the drought of the main characters lives in a mighty rainstorm and flood:
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gustWait: not Ganga, but another Eastern river whose Burgessian name means, as we've seen, 'masturbation':
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and ...
Wanka was sunken, the limp leavesThe last we see of Khan in the novel, he's steering a boat (the police launch) cheerily along the flooded river: Damyata: The boat responded/Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar, and the Crabbes and Adams chat, overlooking the flooded waters. Sitting, we might say, upon the shore/Fishing [at least metaphorically] with the arid plain behind them. Shall they at least set their lands in order? Well, that's the question for the colonial elite in an imminently post-colonial situation, of course.
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
I think something else is going on, here. My hunch is that Burgess takes seriously Eliot's (we can be honest: rather arbitrary) assertion in the notes that 'Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.' This puts the Tiresias passages at the conceptual and affective heart of the poem:
And I Tiresias have foresuffered allThis explains, I think, why Burgess gives so much of the novel over to Ibrahim's stream-of-consciousness interior monologue. He's the most obviously Tiresian character, in that he is a man who dresses as a woman, a man with a female wife who likes to have sex with men. It's quite a thing in a novel from the mid 1950s, actually, how straightforward and non-judgmental Burgess is about this character: venal, vain, rather petty, but also rounded and real, rather glorious in his camp and definitely possessed of a moral compass, though a slightly tarnished one. The other Malay Whites disapprove of Crabbe keeping him as his servant, for the obvious homophobic reasons: 'People had said, "I don't know why the hell you keep that boy on. You'll be getting yourself talked about. He was down outside the cinema the other night wearing women's clothes It's a good job you're married, you know. He was thrown out of the Officers' Mess for waggling his bottom and upsetting the men. He may be a good cook, and all that, but still. You've got to be careful [44]. Crabbe keeps him for reasons no more progressive than a kind of inertia, but Burgess manages to add in pathos to the characterization when we find out about his wife. Married by his family when still a teenager to try and steer him into respectability, Ibrahim has been on the run from his other half, and absconds from the Crabbes service (in a flurry of petty theft and nicely-observed self-righteousness) because he thinks his wife is onto him again.
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.
Then again, my sense is that Burgess makes much of this character not because he has any sense of incipient gay rights, but to literalize the Taoist dualism that structures the novel in a larger sense. At the novel's end, the school throws a dinner to say goodbye to Crabbe (who has been dishonourably transferred away from the school, as it were, by Boothby). Crabbe gets his own back on Boothby, who loses his face and his cool and storms out. The non-Europeans on staff conduct various dignified and eloquent conversations around this pantomime. Mr Raj, the closest the novel gives us to a character able to speak ex cathedra, glosses the succession of dishes served by the restaurant that 'the Taoists believe that the duality of yin and yang functions even in diet. Steamed fish and chicken and vegetable soup and even mushrooms are considered to be cooling foods, edible materialisations of the yang, the pure primal air. The yin, or earth element, inheres in fried dishes and especially in shark's fin soup.' [187] The meal ends, after Boothby's ignominious departure, with Mr Raj prophesying Crabbe's fate:
'And will my life be ruined too?' asked Crabbe.It's west and east, combining, contra Kipling, in a strange blend. The masculine yang and the feminine yin in one Tiresian whole.
'Oh yes,' said Mr Raj calmly. 'But with you [unlike Boothby] it will not be a pity. The country will absorb you and you will cease to be Victor Crabbe. You will less and less find it possible to do the work for which you were sent here. You will lose function and identity. You will be swallowed up and become another kind of eccentric. [193]
No comments:
Post a Comment