Product Description

A brilliant novel from a genuinely exciting new voice in British fiction. A novel for anyone who enjoyed The English Patient.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27221 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-16
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Evening Standard
`Highly enjoyable and fluently written...the story is engrossing and touching.'

Waterstones Books Quarterly
'...the most delightful of hybrids, a literary page-turner…suspenseful until the last page.'

The Times.
'Bewitchingly written and gracefully assured...a graceful ballet of dissonances and congruences, of echoes and discords.'

Customer Reviews

A lesson in not trusting your narrator
For a novel with little action this certainly keeps you turning the pages. We hear Johnny's story from three different narrators but because we never hear his voice we are left undecided as to whether he is a hero or villan. This is a masterclass in how to narrate a novel - for every question that is answered another one is posed and by merging the three stories together you get an almost complete tale. When you get to the end of the novel you realise little has happened but you have still been on a great journey where the smallest things take on the signficance of world events. Beautifully written, witty, poetic - a challenging concept made to look easy.

This book doesn't succeed or work at all
Falls apart after the brief first section. The book is split into three parts and the writer tries to shove a heterosexual love story between Snow and Johnny and Snow and Peter, when it's very clear Peter and Johnny are in love with each other. The whole thing falls flat and flaccid. Characters are cold and unrealistic. I can't recommend this to anyone.

Lost in the jungle....
Johnny Lim, the central character, is the most successful merchant in the Kinta Valley (central Malaysia), trading in textiles and smuggled/stolen goods. He was also a leader of the local communists and he is regarded as a cult figure from his associations with grave deeds, but his influence, cunning and secrecy protect him from being challenged.

The three narrators - Johnny's son, his wife and his best friend, all fail to get inside this shady character. The son regards his father as a traitor and despises the corruption, but it is perhaps more the father's coldness which hurts. Still he is fascinated enough to research Johnny's life and at his father's funeral denies there was any rift between them.

Johnny's wife comes from an elite family and her beauty is no compensation for her aloofness or unfaithfulness. Like much else in this book, the legitimacy of Johnny's son is not resolved - though taking along three extra men on your honeymoon is surely a precursor to disaster!

The flamboyant Peter Wormwood, Johnny's friend, is the least believable character - an Oxford graduate venturing to Malaysia in the 1930's without a role in administration or business, who starts out rather like a backpacker - selling his shoes in order to reach the Valley; yet manages to survive there for the rest of his life without, seemingly, any means of support - an 'actor' who speaks several European languages and (constantly) sings operatic songs! He seems to have breezed through being taken as a Japanese POW, tours the country sitting under bohdi trees like some hippy and ends up in a old peoples' home run by the Catholic Church!

There is no Sherlock Holmes character to eliminate all the red-herrings and tie up all the loose ends. If this is a comment on the nature of relationships - that what we see depends largely on our perspective (as the writer admits in the interview) it still comes as a shock and I feel cheated never getting to find out what made Johnny tick or what special talents he had. I am uncomfortable with the vagueness, and I convinced myself the underlying story had too many cracks to be believable.

I wanted to learn about Malaysia, pre- and post-independence, but found myself part of some intellectual experiment which I never signed up for, and one I have yet to appreciate.