Among more demanding and insistent literary voices, a softer, calmer tone can bring respite, the opportunity to breathe more slowly, to attend more carefully, to appreciate nuance. Such a voice might speak of the complexities of human relationships, especially in the hard years of adolescence, of home and homeland and what they can mean, or simply of the flat gleam of a lake or the weight of enervating heat. The latest novel by award-winning Malaysian author Tash Aw speaks in just such a way, and the result is a quiet triumph.
Summer in the late 1990s, the end of the school year. Technical college lecturer Jack Lim, his wife Sui, their daughters Lina and Yin and their 16-year-old son Jay head south for the holidays to a small, failing farm in rural Malaysia left to Sui by her father-in-law. The manager, Fong, Jack’s estranged brother, has a 19-year-old son, Chuan. Striking, confident and charismatic, he fascinates and beguiles Jay, who begins to shed his timidity and his anxiety about his body, and to explore his sexuality.
But The South is also the story of Jack, disappointed and pessimistic, recently made redundant but unable to tell his children, seeking refuge and distance from intimacy in painting indifferent watercolours. And it is the story of his considerably younger wife and former student, Sui, a whip-smart country girl not considered good enough by most of her in-laws, seeking more from life but finally settling for the status quo. Jay’s sisters – rebellious, sophisticated Lina and obedient Yin – play their parts. And there is Fong, anxious, hating “the greasy workings of money” and always hoping that his latest idea will somehow save the farm.
In thoughtful and superbly controlled prose, Aw moves deftly between different points of view, and first and third person, to explore the uncertainties of adolescence and the imperative to be free of parental control, the intricacies and realities of adulthood, and the workings of class and culture. He never wastes words. Emotions and personalities are sharply and economically delineated. Here is Jay observing his father, Jack: “His stillness made you feel as though you’d committed an offence before you’d even considered it.” Or watching Chuan at the lake when they first go swimming together: “He threw himself into the water again with an exuberant cry like some rare bird. No one could hear us, I realised; no one knew we were here.” Here are old friends Sui and Fong, travelling together to the market: “They throw fragments of their pasts into the air as a way to reacquaint themselves with each other.”
Place is a powerful player in this novel: that lake, the desolate spot at the end of the school sports field where outsider Jay finds refuge, the loud, hot streets of the nearby town full of the smells of food. Although Aw creates an unforced sense of period, especially through the music of the time, and the clothes, there is a timelessness about this book, a universality, an elegiac stillness. His writing has rightly been compared to that of VS Naipaul, and it is easy to understand why Michael Cunningham is an admirer, but this subtle, immersive novel is also perhaps reminiscent, at times, of Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude and At the Bay – the same combination of delicacy and strength, the same insight into the tangles of human, and particularly family, dynamics, the same evocation of surroundings.
The South is the first of an intended quartet, so the understated but profound pleasures of this fine, intelligent novel do not have to end.
