Ted Dorall's Review of Echoes of Silence
--New Straits Times, Saturday, 27th August 1994--
MORE THAN A MYSTERY NOVEL
It is a pleasure to welcome Chuah Guat Eng to the as yet small group of published Malaysian novelists.
But now her book must survive in the toughest world of all, that of the published Malaysian writer. And pray hard, Chuah Guat Eng, if your critic should be of that elite graduate Sadducean class (as I am), for whom there can be no resurrection, artistic as well as physical!
I know my duty, I know the tradition. Can a Malaysian writer rise above the artistic mediocrity of his peninsular outpost of progress, which flaunts regularly some of the most mindless TV and cinema in the supposedly civilised world? He won't. As a critic rising above the prevailing mediocrity myself, I can see that he won't.
I pick up the book. Generously, I pass over its title, Echoes of Silence. (Later I might suggest that Chuah would have been wise not to have broken that silence.)
Page 3. The heroine Lim Ai Lian tells me that on January 15 of this year she learnt she "was the sole beneficiary and executive of Michael Templeton's will. … Which, I realise, is no explanation at all". Then comes Chapter One, dated "Summer 1971", with its (I must grudgingly admit) rather memorable first sentence: "In March 1970, as a direct result of the May 1969 racial riots, I left Malaysia."
(Ha! The trick beginning. Three different dates, an in medias res opening, and a shock sentence in less than a page of text. Well, well! Acting tough already!)
Is this to be a political novel? Another study of post-'69 Malaysia, likeGreen Is The Colour? I have hardly framed the question when Ai Lian meets Michael Templeton in Germany and becomes his lover. Both are students with enough time on and money in their hands to be only romantic. Ah! I say. A pulp novel. Which I immediately re-title Lei Lee Mah Len!
This identification is influenced somewhat by my opinion of Chuah's (or rather Ai Lian's) style. It has none of the solid reality and textual density of Lloyd Fernando's and K.S. Maniam's. It is, rather, chatty, loose, and extremely personal--a woman's style.
I concede that it is literate, suited to its character and the events she describes, occasionally effective in a quiet, unobtrusive way. So I will use one of the following adjectives to describe it, either the expected condemnatory "sentimental" or the conciliatory "limpid".
By page 15 I have re-titled the novel. Michael Templeton's father is a planter in Perak, Michael himself was born and grew up in Malaya, and the two lovers return home for the Christmas of 1973. This is to be a novel of inter-racial love on home soil: Love Is A Malaysian-Splendoured Thing.
I change my mind again on page 35. Ai Lian is visiting Michael on his father's estate. After an afternoon nap she has woken up for tea.
Suddenly a sharp explosion, followed shortly by another, startled me out of my sense of well-being. I sat up, and then lay back again as I remembered. Firecrackers. It was the last day of the Chinese New Year celebration…
I got up. … Just then I heard the sound of someone running outside, right below my window, it seemed. Crossing the room, I pulled the curtains aside and looked out.
There was no one to be seen.
I sit up straight, my nostrils aquiver, like that fellow's from Baker Street. This belongs to quite another world than Han Suyin's. Careful now, Chuah, careful, you're treading on dangerous ground.
She is indeed. So is Ai Lian. After tea, from which an important guest is absent, she goes back to her room to rest before dinner.
I must have nodded off again briefly, for when I heard the sound of the running feet--again on the gravel path outside--I woke with a start to find that it was past six-thirty. … I switched on the bedside lamp and walked across to draw the curtains. Then the firecrackers went off. This time three or four of them, and a lot louder, quite close to the house.
But again, when I looked out, there was no one to be seen.
Strange, I thought, this repetition of sounds. Had I been dreaming?
Of course she hasn't. What she heard were shots. And early the next morning the dead body of the absent guest is discovered in some belukar near the house, riddled with bullets. Echoes of Silence settles down to being primarily a mystery story. Which I promptly re-title, acidly, The Fright Of The Fleeing Footsteps or, alternatively, The Flight of the Frightened Footsteps.
There are not many main characters to suspect. Then when a valuable diamond necklace owned by the victim is missing, Inspector Tajuddin suspects an impulsive or prepared burglar. (Which, of course, we know it can't be.) And then the necklace turns up suddenly in Ai Lian's hands….
I don't know whether to sneer or cheer. Some weeks ago at a seminar (attended by Chuah), I described the mystery novel as a minor genre, enjoyable only as a puzzle, its characters interesting primarily for their role in a plot, from which real life is conspicuously absent. Even the greatest writers have failed to do more with it. The detective story inBleak Housedoesn't integrate with the rest of the book, and if the mystery in Edwin Drood does, admirably, remember it is an unfinished novel. Which detective story has ever been more than just a mystery and its solution? I can't think of any.
So I decide to sneer, and begin to dissectEchoes of Silenceas a detective story. It is immensely long for its genre--343 big pages, nearly twice the length of anAgatha. And its pace is incredibly leisurely. Before the murder Ai Lian has given us 10 pages of a visit she made as a child to her grandmother's pig farm. Later in the novel she takes time to remember scenes of her life in Germany and with her family in Malaysia.
The detective investigation is a series of conversations and visits. Time is spent on scenery and family backgrounds. No one seems in a hurry to find the criminal. And then, just after page 100, the investigation is closed, and the main characters move apart. However, soon after, Ai Lian is staring in shock at the missing diamond necklace.
At which point, for 70 pages, we have a flashback to the opening months of the Japanese invasion of Malaysia, reconstructed by Michael as he narrates events in his parents' life before his birth. I stiffen again in recognition. Inevitably I say the expected sacred word "Conrad" and prepare to castigate Chuah for imitating him.
But by now I am, frankly, no longer sneering. The plot, if it is still progressing slowly as a narrative, is certainly very interesting and complex as a mystery. I am fairly certain by now who the murderer is, but I am not at all certain of anything else. A vast web of relationships has been exposed, in which the main characters have become entangled. When the narrative returns from Michael's manuscript of events in the 1940s (read by Ai Lian this year) to the events in 1974, we benefit from knowledge of it.
Not that we are any nearer though to the how of the murder, what has baffled me all along--the explanation of shots and footsteps, then footsteps and shots. By now too we know there was another murder on the same spot and in the same manner, over 20 years earlier.
At this point I (again grudgingly) concede that, as a mystery story,Echoes of Silenceis admirably crafted. This is no mean achievement. A mere entertainment the murder story may be, but it requires great cleverness to manufacture.
Perhaps her interrelationships are a trifle too fortuitous as art (they are clearly beyond average reality), but this seems hardly to be a blemish here, in this particular art form. I find myself wondering if this mystery novel is not as good as a goodChristieand far better than most detective stories I have read.
By now I am postponing other things and eating quickly so that I can get back to it. At the end I am not particularly happy to know that I guessed right (since I rarely guess wrong), but I am very satisfied with the explanation of those haunting footsteps. I turn back to earlier pages to appreciate the technique that kept me in suspense. It's worthy of an accomplished mystery writer, incredible for a first-timer.
But we are still discussing a mere entertainment, the product of a craftsman not an artist. Is Chuah Guat Eng to be just that, the Malaysian Agatha?
No, I reluctantly concede. For a long time before the end I was aware thatEchoes of Silenceis far more than a mystery novel, that it in fact has achieved what I thought was impossible. Not all its events are related to the murder. The others are part of another pattern, which has been there from the opening pages. In the blurb of the back cover Chuah claims that, in the process of finding the murderer, Ai Lian "finds herself, learning about racial prejudice, human relationships, right and wrong, truth and deception, guilt and innocence, womanhood, love and the way past silences echo in the present."
I sneered. (And hear every other reader sneer with me.) Is the woman mad? What? All these themes in one novel?
And the answer is, Yes. All these themes are in this novel. Quietly stated and firmly developed. Ai Lian begins as the Europeanised Asian wanting openness and truth in her relationships, impatient with her parents and other Malaysians for their reluctance to talk about their past. The mystery itself is a conspiracy of silence on the part of most of the characters.
Towards the end of the novel Ai Lian acts for her beliefs, her distorted ideal of love. But at the very end she has learnt the value of Asian silences, the greater love there can be in not revealing the truth about the past. "Love," one of the characters tells her, "has little to do with hankering for someone from afar. It has to do with doing, doing something for someone, even when it is an inconvenience."
The older characters in the novel have worked, suffered, and kept silence for each other; when Ai Lian decides to do the same she has finally come home. The desperate departure of the first sentence has terminated in a triumphant return.
And I can see how this has been done. The time shifts, from today to the Seventies, then to the Forties, and back again intermittently, have kept us constantly in three different but related worlds. The leisurely pace has allowed for the serious novel to develop with the mystery story. And the quiet style has authentically, and seemingly effortlessly, described a variety of experiences--life on a pig farm, in a small town, in a rubber planter's bungalow before the war and 30 years later. They have all combined to makeEchoes of Silencean intellectual as well as a tender novel about love.
If Chuah's second novel, already announced asDays of Change, should be as entertaining (or unentertaining), intelligent (or unintelligent), and well crafted (or badly crafted) as her first, its publication will be a national literary event!