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Article Excerpt
Born in 1971, Tash Aw is Malaysian by nationality, Chinese by origin, and British by education. A bilingual speaker of Chinese and English, he did his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in law at Warwick and Cambridge Universities and, subsequently, studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia. In the early spring of 2005, he made a striking debut with the publication of The Harmony Silk Factory. The paperback version and release in the United States followed in quick succession. By the summer of 2005 it was translated and published in Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Greek; it is currently being translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish for forthcoming publication in 2006. The novel was long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize and won the prestigious Whitbread First Novel Award for 2005. (1)
Fortunate indeed is a "first novel," a product of "high culture" at that, to enjoy such rapid success and receive instant critical acclaim. The mostly enthusiastic book reviews to date concentrate on the novel's plot and obediently follow the lead of the persona whose "Ich-Erzahlung" begins Part One in medias res. The reviewers suggest that the presumed main hero, Johnny, occupies the center of attention for the reader who is to decide whether he is a criminal, an innocent victim of events largely outside his control, a loving husband and father, or a cynical crook (Gee, Hickling, Mukherjee, and Zaltzmann).
This article will conduct its investigation elsewhere. Aw's novel focuses predominantly on the impact of British colonialism on the representative characters of the colonizing English and the colonized Malaysian Chinese civilizations. Undoubtedly, readers may hear echoes of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and E. M. Foster. Also, perhaps less obviously, the voices of other modernist writers of the British Isles such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf engage with this text. The Harmony Silk Factory, however, is not a nostalgic pastiche of modernist themes and techniques, nor does it claim to re-invent the disappearance of the omniscient narrator. Instead, it carefully interrogates assumptions, not only about the existence of a unified human subject, but, more importantly, about the very possibility of constructing any unified body of knowledge. For all his questions, however, no release from moral responsibility is envisaged, nor are evil and crime relativized in Aw's world. Hence, even though he avoids many of the external features of philosophically conscious, often highly ornate, contemporary literary prose writing as well as its blurring of the categories of ethics and aesthetics, his novel problematizes the relationship between narrative and epistemology in a provocative, "post-modern," manner.
Three overtly partial storytelling voices comprise the novel. These three intradiegetic narrators alter, complement, and distort each other even as they provide accounts of the main events of the plot: the murder in the mine; the relationship between Johnny and Tiger; the friendship between Johnny and Peter; the story of the Soong family; the courtship between Johnny and Snow and the history of their marriage; Kunichika Mamoru's role; the trip of all main characters to the islands called "Seven Maidens"; and finally Jasper's, Peter's, and Johnny's lives during the four decades after Snow's death. The time frame of the novel is roughly between 1940 and the mid-1980s. Within the different narrative renderings of the same events, as in James Joyce's Ulysses, we experience "parallax," that is, when the same happening or object is viewed from different spatio-temporal angles by different individuals in different places at different times. In the first part of the novel, Johnny is described as a murderer, his first de facto murder having been the one of the English factory manager in the mine, well before the events of the plot take place. But then we hear another account of this event where the identity of the Chinese man reacting against his British supervisor remains obscure. Neither of the other two narrators shares the first, and least knowledgeable, storyteller's certainty about this and subsequent murders committed by Johnny. Other parallaxes relate to Johnny's role in the accident and fire in which his father-in-law gets injured, or the complex relations among Snow; her husband, Johnny; and Snow's parents. But unlike in Joyce, different people's awareness of what happened can be so strikingly at variance in this novel that the "truth" becomes shrouded in complete mystery. The narrating voices belong to characters central to the novel's consciousness: to Jasper, who is Snow's son, to Snow herself, and to Peter (who infers he is Jasper's father). Peter's general unreliability makes his account particularly suspect. Yet it is only...
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