Samarasan’s debut novel in its ambition and depth is certainly commendable: Evening is the Whole Day interrogates the tensions between public and private life for the predominantly Tamil Indian diaspora who have settled in Malaysia. The novel centres around a dysfunctional Tamil family living in the city of Ipoh, and the “oldest-eldest” sister’s desire for escape from this dysfunction to a New York University. This is then underpinned by the political and ethnic issues facing the Malaysian nation, which constitutes a strong central chapter of the novel. This premise should attract interest from many Western readers, eager to learn more of the political upheaval faced by the country so evocatively described in the novel’s opening sentences.
Readers, however, should be warned that this is by no means a political novel; and it is perhaps the over-emphasis on this single and seemingly idiosyncratic family that lies at the roots of the novel’s many shortcomings. These become apparent in the opening chapter, where Samarasan’s prose becomes increasingly strained in attempts to capture every nuance of a particular moment in time. This over-detailing patronises the reader’s imagination, allowing the narration to stagnate in its persistence to linger over every subtlety of every character’s consciousness. Further into the novel, glaring and unimaginative allegories are drawn in the synchrony between public and private life in the case of ‘the Big House’ being signed from the old British coloniser McDougall over to ‘Tata’, then head of the Rajasekharan family.
Most of all, the novel cannot seem to make up its mind as to whether it is most in debt to the Western literary tradition, in its scrutiny of the family dramas in ‘the Big House’; or to the inevitable ‘anxieties of influence’ in the form of Rushdie and Roy. These comparisons, made my many of Samarasan’s critics so far, are certainly justified, but not necessarily for the best reasons. The influence of Arundhati Roy in particular is painfully discernible in Aasha’s characterisation as the child who truly sees the ‘reality’ of the family’s respective traumas; yet in Evening the awarding of the child with supernatural, visionary qualities is an ungainly device which jars with the dense realism of most of the novel.
However, there are large parts of the novel which do display Samarasan’s strength as a writer, most notably the chapters which reflect on the courtship and past of Appa and Amma. They constitute some of the more evocative passages of the novel, allowing the older characters to become fully realised and more sympathetic to our readership. Amma’s background gives a particularly sensitive insight into life away from the privileges of life in ‘The Big House’; yet this is sorely under-developed elsewhere, merely glimpsed through Chellam’s disgrace and the brief insights into subaltern life elsewhere in Ipoh.
Unfortunately, readers hoping for a sustained evocative depiction of Malaysia will be disappointed: besides the cursory chapter on the 1969 riots, the novel overall lacks a distinct sense of national place, replaced instead by the stifling presence of the domestic. This, alongside a clear anxiety of influence and the painful density of the prose, are the hallmarks of this unfortunately faltering debut.
Jenny Treble
