Profoundly unimpressed by Tan Twan Eng’s The gift of rain. I read his second and more famous novel shortly before going to Malaysia and didn’t care for it but remember almost nothing of it, while this one, his first, is excruciating. It’s very much a first novel, for one: he’s lovingly put everything he wanted to write in it, complete with unbelievable cod-tropical cod-magic realist touches like an English father recounting to his son how his much younger Chinese wife captured fire flies to put in their mosquito net one night ‘and that is the night you were conceived’, or a gay sex scene involving katanas plunging into another, or a Japanese woman who is dying of cancer because of course she was in Hiroshima. Every character is astonishingly passive, and the book is so thoroughly written for as western readership it’s almost embarrassing – the narrator, for instance, grows up in Penang and speaks fluent Hokkien, yet for some reason has to have the festival of hungry ghosts explained to him by a Chinese servitor. The writing astonishingly affectless (intentionally? Perhaps, but so flatly that I am not inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt), with the narrator remarking that ‘the atmosphere between my father and me had deteriorated further after the incident at Kampong Dugong’ – the incident in question being the mass murder of villagers by the narrator’s companions, the gang rape of one of their wives, who then digs up the mass grave with her bare hands and slits her wrists next to the body, and is also the daughter of the Chinese servitor above, so I daresay the relationship has deteriorated but luckily the father is too passive to do anything but stick around and look grumpy.
There are also echoes of the embarrassing racial politics of Malaysia, with Chinese, English and Japanese as the only (somewhat) rounded characters, while the Malays are all either princes in yellow or naked village children while the Indians are untrustworthy and treacherous workers who betray their own side as easily as their bosses. A good old fashioned hate read for me.
I haven’t finished it yet, and there are some positive reviews of it, especially the ending, so I will press ‘publish’ on this rant now as I have enjoyed writing it. If I am wrong I shall come write another blog post to correct myself.