Living in the margins

Tash Aw. Photo / Supplied

It's not hard to conclude there are other things that Tash Aw would prefer to be doing on a chilly London lunchtime than sitting in a hotel bar talking about himself.

Indeed, the 37-year-old hasn't even taken off his coat before he is explaining his reluctance to be interviewed. "It's a funny place to be when you finish a novel," he says. "I finished my novel about eight or nine months ago so in my headspace, I'm already starting on my next. But then you have to come back and talk about it. Some people are naturals at doing publicity but I'm not really. I'd rather sit at home and write. But it's a part of the job you have to accept. It's the only thing I've had to learn about being a writer. You have to set aside a couple of months of your life and just stop writing, which is difficult."

However, once the conversation starts flowing Aw proves to be engaging company, meticulously analysing his work. Despite his initial reticence, he is "really excited" about attending the Writers & Readers Festival as he's "been wanting to go to New Zealand for years."

Aw's Auckland visit will coincide with the publication of Map of the Invisible World, the long-awaited follow-up to his 2005 debut The Harmony Silk Factory, which scooped the Costa First Novel Award and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Anticipation is running high. Not that Aw is allowing the pressure, which he admits is "worse, far worse" this time around, to get to him.

"When people talk about 'second novel syndrome' what they mean is if people loved your first novel then you're expected to reproduce it and go one better," he says. "But when I sit down to write, I don't think of any of that. I'm quite good at insulating myself from other people's expectations. As a writer, you always want to push your boundaries and do things that you didn't do in your first novel.

"Let's face it, you can have a first novel that's done very well but as a writer you're still a novice. You're completely at the start of your career. You might have all these artistic ambitions that you want to achieve in your second novel but you're not actually that advanced as a writer, so you might not have the skills to do what you want to do at this stage in your career. That's where anxiety lies."

As Remains of the Day author Kazuo Ishiguro recently told the Guardian, there comes a point where, if you only produce a new work every four or five years, "you can count the number of books you're going to write before you die. And you think, God, there's only four left".

"The strike rate's pretty high if you want to do interesting things as a writer and challenge yourself," says Aw. "You haven't got that many bites of the cherry, so every book you write you have to make sure it's going towards something you really want to do and is not just what your publisher, agent or audience expect of you. It's purely a personal thing. I don't think about how many copies I should sell. It's a question of whether I can do what I want to do with a particular novel."

He also resists attempts to categorise him as a Southeast Asian writer. "People of my generation have grown up in a world where those tags are no longer relevant," says Aw, who was raised in Kuala Lumpur but has lived in England since the age of 18.

"I have a strong Asian identity but physically I spend half my year in the West. So there's a notion of home and therefore a notion of where my writing comes from." Indeed, one of Map of the Invisible World's ensemble cast, expat American university lecturer Margaret, claims to have five homes.

"We live in a world which is hugely globalised and people like Margaret are obvious examples of human migration," says Aw. "National boundaries are no longer as strong as they used to be and there's much more cultural mixing than we've ever seen before. My own personal circumstances reflect this and it's bound to filter into my writing." Central to Aw's work is the concept of the outsider, whom he says, "can exist not just when you're foreign but also when you're disenfranchised. It's possible to be an outsider in your own country even if you've never left it and have spent your whole life there. It's possible to feel like you're living in the margins of that society.

In my work, there's always some character who is like that. "It's about the invisibility of the world and of so many things," says Aw. "First of all, it represents the world we have lost and for Margaret that means losing a life of happiness. But also living in England for most of the year, I'm aware of how invisible Southeast Asia is on the world map. There's a lot of talk in the West right now about Islam and fundamentalism and how Pakistan is an enormous, populous country. But Indonesia is by far the most populous Muslim country in the world.

There are 250 million people and 90 per cent of them are Muslim. But no one ever talks about it." Revolving around 16-year-old Indo-nesian orphan Adam's search for his long-lost brother Johann, Map of the Invisible World is essentially a book about family, albeit fractured family. "It's not possible to come from an Asian background and not be aware of the role of family because it is so tied in with the idea of home," says Aw.

"When you come from a dislocated background, it makes it harder to locate yourself within a specific cultural framework. Someone like Adam doesn't have any parents or any family at all. The families they've had are artificial so they're trying desperately to create something out of nothing." After setting The Harmony Silk Factory during the 1930s, Aw has moved forward several decades to the 1960s.

"I wanted to examine the change in Southeast Asian culture, society and politics over the last 50 years," he says. "From [World War II] onwards, what you might call modern Southeast Asian history. My first novel dealt with the first big changes after the end of colonialism. With this one, I wanted to look at how countries like Malaysia and Indonesia have dealt with independence."

Aw's next novel will take place in the present day. "What I want to do in my third and fourth books is explore how Southeast Asia has now moved on even further. My third novel is based in contemporary times. It will explore how society has changed much more quickly in Asia than it has in Western countries. I went to Paris recently and was struck by how little it has changed since I first went there when I was at university 15 years ago. Like a lot of other old European cities, it barely changes, year on year."

* Tash Aw is a guest at the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, Aotea Centre, May 13-17; see www.writersfestival.co.nz