This rich, arresting debut depicts the fortunes and failures of a merchant family in post (and briefly, pre) colonial Malaysia. Whilst echoes of similar works abound –reviews have frequently invoked Rushdie and Roy – Samarasan deftly avoids cliché and the liberal hand-wringing often present in exotic, colonial narratives. Yet, whilst any analysis of the novel will inevitably turn to the politics inherent to its setting, this is a fundamentally human tale in which contrasting lives and experiences become, nonetheless, emblematic of wider cultures. The Rajasekharan family and their rambling house on Kingfisher Lane might be a metaphor for Malaysia itself, yet Samarasan never uses this to hammer a message home. Instead, the pleasures to be drawn from the novel lie within finely drawn characters and the deeply buried secrets they conceal.
Samarasan manages her sprawling cast list effectively, and moves smoothly between three generations and several time periods, the older of which feel thoroughly researched and powerfully immersive. The country’s turbulent past is explored with focus and the tone skips appropriately, from tragic to comic, with only the rarest of jarring.
While the author weaves several dialects in and out of the text, the narrative voice is chiefly an evocative, playful presence drenched with the South East Asian flavour. Elsewhere, a vein of excursion into the supernatural avoids the insultingly naïve; post colonial narratives have tended to invoke local mythologies with a straight face, but here the ghosts haunting the novel’s pages are of refreshingly diverse backgrounds, reflecting the many owners of Malaysia. Their behaviour is, refreshingly, often less than appropriate.
The author’s biographical material tells us that she is a true internationalist, having lived in several disparate territories around the globe. With this first effort she shows great skill and future promise and we can only hope she treats her next locale with a similar depth of feeling and due respect. Wonderful stuff.
