BOOKS

Why can't they write better novels?

Timothy Mo

TRAVELLER'S LITERARY COMPANION: SOUTH EAST ASIA edited by Alastair Dingwall In Print Publishing, 9 Beaufort Terrace, Brighton, BN2 2SU, tel:• 01273 682836, £13.95, pp. 472 Im no great advocate of travel guides. Too often they intervene between the read- er and an actual experience, or even replace it altogether. I think principally of the C-format volume, adjectivally lush and offset by Asian printers prepared to do colour at a fraction of British prices. I do make space in my 20 kgs luggage allowance for anything from Lonely Planet, together with a dog-eared copy of the witty Dr Richard Dawood's Traveller's Health. In this latter, excellent category is the volume under review. In fact, it is difficult to imagine how a clever idea could have been better realised.

Series editor Alastair Dingwall provides a flying introduction before ten scholars contribute a critical history apiece on the literatures of Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, with a buffet of extracts from authors dead and contemporary, native and foreign, concluding each section. As Margaret Drabble remarks in her fore- word: This is the series I have been looking for all my travelling life. Discovering new writers and new countries is one of the greatest pleasures we know ...

Which should broaden the mind, as the saying goes, but I found this generously- ranging work, with its innumerable references, actually confirming prejudices I already held based on a narrower know- ledge.

The first concerns the consistently low level of local achievement, particularly in prose fiction. The difference in standard, for instance, between the critical introduc- tions to each country and some of the chosen extracts is almost embarrassing, the scholars officiating as jovially as if they were Premier League referees doing a stint at their son's Sunday kick-around. Alastair Dingwall refers to translators as the `unsung heroes' of the collection, but they can also be Quislings. Celebrated works in minority languages have to be taken on trust, but in translation mediocrity becomes all too apparent. I think of the utterly indif- ferent Indonesian Mochtar Lubis's Twilight in Jakarta and of his political enemy Pramoedya Ananta Toer's works. They may be courageous and principled men; good writers they are not.

This is not a purely modem phenomenon. The Philippine nationalist martyr Jose Rizal wrote two conventionally venerated novels in Spanish, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, the only good things about which are the titles. Oth- erwise, the books are so heavily influenced by Hugo and Dumas, what with buried treasures and mysterious returning strangers that no one, rather implausibly, can recognise. Rizal penned Mi ultimo adios in a cell the night before he was shot. It begins, 'Adios, Patria adorada . . . ', goes on to talk of the pearl of the eastern seas, and gets still worse. Even in the death cell a true writer will be incapable of clichés. Instead of French authors, the modern Fil- ipina will add a dash of magical realism here, a sprinkling of feminism there.

My second prejudice concerns the visit- ing or expatriate writers. S. E. Asia was used as a setting by one writer of genius, Conrad, and by some exceptionally good ones, including Somerset Maugham (`in the very front row of the second-rankers,' as he described himself), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, and Paul Theroux. Technically, these outsiders display an ambition and mastery of construction and language which have yet to be matched by native authors. Yet these heavyweights skated precariously on the surface of the societies they visited. Conrad had a try at Are you going to sit there and allow my intelligence to be insulted?' native characters; in my opinion disastrous- ly in Dain Waris and Doramin of Lord Jim and the eponymous Karain: A Memory, but at least he had the courtesy to try. Greene didn't even bother. The Annamese in The Quiet American are cyphers. The give-away about Greene is the frequency with which hotels like the Sevilla in Havana appear in his foreign novels:

... you couldn't believe it would ever be seven o'clock and cocktail-time on the roof of the Majestic with a wind from Saigon river.

Defenders like to say that Conrad and Greene viewed their settings purely as counterpoints to psychological and moral dilemmas; to which I would reply that this cuts no ice with me. Writers have several concerns simultaneously progressing in novel; the more balls you can juggle, the better you are. Afternoon tea with Henry James is acceptable; gin-sling on the Majes- tic is not.

The inability to see individual faces in the Asian crowd is a serious writerly lapse, with horrendous real-life consequences. The uninterest in the society where the occidental psychosis resolves itself reaches its nadir in that piece of sub-Conradian pastiche, Apocalypse Now. What I remem- ber about the film is not the exploding napalm or even Brando's dome but the misspelling of the Philippines as Phillipines in Kurtz's file. They only shot most of the film there. Our Man in a Hole or Exotic Folk in Chaos could be multi-purpose titles for this genre, whether cinema or novel, tragic or comic, or indeed pornographic.

So if the visitors are brilliant skimmers and the natives uninspired, where does that leave the ball? It is not impossible for Asians to be superb writers. If S. E. Asians are as good at the novel and the poem as they are at the high jump and the shot, then the Indians are the Finns of Asia with world records a-plenty. One reason for Indian success is simply the huge talent pool with a population of 800 million. On the other hand 150 million Indonesians ought to have done better, and Ireland, for instance, with its tiny population has given the world innumerable literary master- pieces.

I believe the reasons to lie deep in S. E. Asian culture, social as well as literary. Although the so-called Tiger economies have adapted in the material sphere by producing Western inventions more cheaply, the literatures have not really modernised. The influence of Buddhism, of the Indian Ramayana, of oral story-telling with its devices of repetition and paral- lelism, and the supremacy of poetry and the epic until comparatively recently, have all been mixed blessings for contemporary writers. As a celebrated scholar remarks of classical Thai literature:

The emphasis is upon heroes and villains and court pageantry, not on character and plot development . . . the emphasis upon finding new and more elegant ways to express the same themes is suggestive of the music of Haydn and Mozart.

T. J. Hudak notes: While there has been some experimentation with blank and free verse in contemporary poetry, most modern poets continue to use the classical verse forms, favouring khlong and klon.

In other words, the country may export 18/10-grade stainless-steel pots and hold the Asian Durex franchise, but the Siamese Gerard Manley Hopkins, still less T. S. Eliot, have yet to arrive.

So far as novels are concerned, Asian societies tend to be consensus-based, hier- archical and paternalistic, with the family featuring as the primary social unit of sur- vival, rather than the individual as in the West. Not very propitious for a literary form that depends heavily on conflict and personality. I know just how damnably difficult it is to use Orientals as characters in a form which had its greatest glories in 19th-century European bourgeois circles.

This culture also produces intensely authoritarian governments, many outright military dictatorships, though it is perhaps easier to write on Indonesia's political prison, Burn island, than in places with subtler censorships. The effect of political repression on the region's literature should not be underestimated. The locals among the ten scholars contributing to this volume should also be congratulated on the inde- pendence of mind they display in their commentaries and choices of text. 'Most writers,' comments Isagani Cruz, 'did not consider Corazon Aquino to be any differ- ent from Ferdinand Marcos in terms of commitment to truth and beauty.'

Language itself is another obstacle unknown to writers in English, although I have never taken the amazing brilliance of bi-lingual Indians for granted and do so even less as the years pass. Not all nationalities display this extraordinary sub- continental affinity and to write in a modern language of the region is an issue in itself. Most of the new national languages were imposed by elites or dominant regions as instruments of political unification; they were not inherit- ed tongues with the rich accretions of bookish tradition. Modern Vietnamese alphabetised script was the invention of the French missionary Alexander de Rhodes (no prizes for guessing he was a Jesuit), while all 85 Philippine languages and the hundreds of dialects (excluding Muslim regions of the deep south) are written in the English 26-letter alphabet. The use of Tagalog (a Northern language) as the national language is still an immensely volatile political issue, especially amongst the large Cebuano-speaking population. As for Bahasa Indonesia, a singularly con- temptuous Dutch-Eurasian doctor, once described it to me as kitchen Malay, ratio- nalised by Dutch academics and spread at the point of the Javanese bayonet. I think he was exaggerating, but his opinion is at least historically interesting.

Strident nationalism does not necessarily make interesting literature. It is no coinci- dence that Y. B. Mangunwijaya, Catholic priest and trained architect, features as the most interesting Indonesian novelist of the collection. His subtlety and originality in writing a morally complex novel whose hero fought on the side of the Dutch makes far superior reading to the simplistic nationalistic pieties of cruder authors.

The ancient herd psychology and the modern chip on the shoulder combine as related opposites to form something new, just as black and white make grey: a lack of adventure or daring amongst many region- al writers. I remember suggesting to a group of writers in a small but prosperous Republic that if foreign writers had taken their Eastern world as material, why shouldn't they write about a Western soci- ety from the outside? The ladies went weak at the knees and amongst the males there was a collective scrotum-shrinking. We couldn't do that, went the chorus; people wouldn't like it, it would be unpatriotic and unexpected. I submit those may well be virtues in a writer.

Of course, the economically dynamic, politically, ethnically, and religiously unstable societies of the region, with populations visibly younger than those of a European street, make fresher material. But that wasn't the point which struck them. It is certainly debatable which histor- ical moment is better for literature: the pinpoint of intense light at the instant of explosive displacement and development or the more subtle luminescence of ancient empires in decay — such as fertilised the great English and Hispanic literatures of the last half-century. If it is the last, as I suspect, it may be a long time before the red shift phenomenon reaches the world from a S. E. Asian luminary.

And round and round and round again, that's good, and one more time . .