Tash Aw went to university in Britain and has spent much of his adult life in the UK, France and Germany, but most of his fiction has been set in and around Malaysia, where he grew up. His debut, The Harmony Silk Factory (2005), was about a textile entrepreneur in British-occupied Malaya between the wars. Map of the Invisible World (2009) told the story of two brothers adopted into different families — one in Malaysia, the other Indonesia.
The South is a more intimate proposition, even if — as the first instalment of a proposed quartet — it promises to end up being bigger in scope than anything Aw has written before. It’s set in Malaysia in 1997, and Jay Lim and his family — father Jack, sisters Yin and Lina and mother Sui — have gone south for the holidays to stay on the “twenty hectares of scrubby jungle and farmland” bought by Jack’s father years before. Now the old man has died, and the family have returned for some sort of reckoning.
The farm is managed by Fong, Jack’s illegitimate half-brother, who lives there with his teenage son Chuan. But it is in a poor state, and Fong struggles to make it pay. Year after year, the crops fail. There are floods and fires. A plantation of symbolically laden tamarind trees is dying.
At 19, Chuan is caught on the cusp of manhood, just as he is caught between worlds: though he works on the farm, he also has a job in a 7-Eleven in the nearby city, and dreams of escaping further afield. Chuan and Jay strike up a friendship that soon becomes sexual. Their relationship forms the heart of the book, and it is told beautifully: a slow, steady accretion of secret touches, hidden glances, unapologetic desire.
Various family tensions are hung around this central spine. Jack, bookish, authoritarian, aspirationally middle class, has an uneasy relationship with his country wife Sui, and his half-brother, who is worried about what will happen to his only son. Chapters are alternately narrated by Jay in the first person and by a close third-person narrator which, it emerges, is Jay looking back from some point in the future (from when, one imagines, this will become clear later in the quartet).
Identity and self-invention have loomed large in most of Aw’s previous novels. In The South identities are shown to be both contested and contestable. Jack, a teacher, is ostracised by his colleagues for his Chinese ethnicity; Yin has a secret Malay boyfriend whom, even though he is the “modern kind, quite open-minded of course”, she still worries what her parents will think of. Then there is Jay’s sexual identity, a secret, delicate thing that can’t be confronted directly.
Migration and belonging are another of the book’s lightly worn themes. Fong became a single dad after his wife went to Singapore for a job and never returned; Chuan has dreams of following in her footsteps. Aw has visited the territory of exile before, in Five Star Billionaire (2013) in which four ambitious Malaysian expats tried to make a life for themselves in Shanghai, and it’s easy to imagine where Chuan and Jay might end up.
The prose is spare and unadorned, but it sometimes feels slightly underworked. Near the end of the novel there are some curious repetitions. For example: “This place offers respite,” Jay thinks about a patch of ground near his school where the misfits hang out, “not just to me but to others like me.” Then, on the next page: “This is a place that people escape to, in search of brief respite.” Later, when Lina is about to leave the farm for the north, Jay is described as having “suggested going for a swim in the lake before she left but she said there was no point in wasting time”. When he leaves, a few pages later, he repeats the idea almost verbatim to Chuan: “I’d suggested going for a final swim in the lake but neither of us wanted to hang around longer than was necessary.”
I couldn’t work out if these repetitions were there to suggest a kind of writerly equivocation — the work of a mind trying out the same thought in different ways, drafting, editing, creating a story — or whether they just reflect a lack of care. Perhaps this will become clear across the quartet, but in The South questions like this feel frustratingly unresolved.
The South by Tash Aw Fourth Estate £16.99, 304 pages
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