This promising first novel by our very own Tash Aw opens with a declaration which sounds like a simple and irresistible manifesto: tell “The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny”. So says Jasper Lim, who, in the first of this novel’s three parts, collects and dissects materials, a great majority of them orally passed down, to understand everything about his father Johnny.
By the end, we know that nothing is simple, for Jasper has been looking in quite the wrong direction. In fact, the haunting question that this multi-layered narrative answers is not “How wicked was my father?” but “Who was my father?” At the same time, Tash Aw ironically disapproves Jasper’s conviction that “Death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed”.
The second narrator to speak is Lim's deceased wife Snow, in the pages she kept detailing a bizarre honeymoon conducted in the company of three unlikely companions: a sybaritic mine-owner called Honey; Lim's friend, Peter Wormwood; and the smooth Japanese devil Kunichika.
At the behest of the bride's parents, this peculiar party set off on a badly organised journey to a remote set of islands, and almost perished in a violent tropical storm. During the ordeal, Snow is shown to be increasingly attracted to the charms of the Japanese scholar--while Lim seeks solace with his new acquittance, the flamboyantly mischievous Wormwood.
In the final section of the book we witness the same events again, this time filtered through the memories of a now elderly Wormwood, spent his final part of life in an Oriental old people's home. This eccentric character seemed to detect in Johnny a guileless innocence that none of the others noticed, and plans to plant a garden in honour of his friend.
Aw makes a credible job of modulating the varying tones of voice by which the smiling villain of the first part comes to be seen as the pitiful victim in the end. Aside from the unreliable narration, I cannot help but wonder whether the obfuscation and contradictions in this three-cornered portrait of Johnny Lim are a product of the book's maddening inconsistency, or its mysterious appeal.
By the end, we know that nothing is simple, for Jasper has been looking in quite the wrong direction. In fact, the haunting question that this multi-layered narrative answers is not “How wicked was my father?” but “Who was my father?” At the same time, Tash Aw ironically disapproves Jasper’s conviction that “Death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed”.
The second narrator to speak is Lim's deceased wife Snow, in the pages she kept detailing a bizarre honeymoon conducted in the company of three unlikely companions: a sybaritic mine-owner called Honey; Lim's friend, Peter Wormwood; and the smooth Japanese devil Kunichika.
At the behest of the bride's parents, this peculiar party set off on a badly organised journey to a remote set of islands, and almost perished in a violent tropical storm. During the ordeal, Snow is shown to be increasingly attracted to the charms of the Japanese scholar--while Lim seeks solace with his new acquittance, the flamboyantly mischievous Wormwood.
In the final section of the book we witness the same events again, this time filtered through the memories of a now elderly Wormwood, spent his final part of life in an Oriental old people's home. This eccentric character seemed to detect in Johnny a guileless innocence that none of the others noticed, and plans to plant a garden in honour of his friend.
Aw makes a credible job of modulating the varying tones of voice by which the smiling villain of the first part comes to be seen as the pitiful victim in the end. Aside from the unreliable narration, I cannot help but wonder whether the obfuscation and contradictions in this three-cornered portrait of Johnny Lim are a product of the book's maddening inconsistency, or its mysterious appeal.
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