Colonial fantasies laid to rest
Photo: Cathryn Tremain
Tash Aw turned his back on the law in order to write. His first novel shows his decision was wise. He spoke to Aviva Tuffield.
To all appearances, Tash Aw has bounded onto the global literary stage with relative ease: at 33, the London-based Malaysian writer has received both a sizeable advance and international acclaim for his debut novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, which has just been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. But, as Aw tells me from his home, he has waited a long time for this and worked extremely hard to get it.
Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Aw always wanted to be a novelist but, he says, "in a middle-class Malaysian family, no one's going to encourage you to be a writer". He was certainly encouraged to read, "but on the assumption that you are going to go on and read lots of books that will make you interested in law or banking".
As a child, he read the classics of British and European literature, but the novel that had a major impact on him and was the catalyst for his writing aspirations was Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea. Since then, he's always been drawn to 20th-century American literature, his favourite novelists being Faulkner and Steinbeck.
There were few home-grown role models for Aw at that time. Asked about the literary representations of Malaysia available to him as a child, Aw declares: "That's the big tragedy; there were none because the educated elite in Malaysia read in English. The problem with Malaysian and South-East Asian literature in general is that it's based on an oral tradition; storytelling is this oral thing, so there's not this huge base of literature."
Instead, some of the best-known depictions of Malaysia are by colonial writers such as Joseph Conrad, Anthony Burgess and especially Somerset Maugham, for whom Aw has a lifelong aversion.
Acceding to his parents' wishes to acquire a profession, Aw went to Cambridge University to study law, which he really enjoyed. "I like the idea of law as an academic subject... The practice of law is something else completely; it's awful."
By the time he had completed his degree, he was more determined than ever to concentrate on writing. "From the time I left university I was very serious about it and I had this idea that I would be kind of Flaubertian in my approach to it, that I would write every single day." He moved to London and did odd jobs for a while to leave himself time to write but then, he says, not only were the funds running low but he knew he wasn't ready to produce his "great Malaysian novel".
"I was very, very aware of the fact that I didn't have the skills to write my first novel."
Again the security of the professional life beckoned and Aw decided to study for his law-qualifying exams. Once qualified, he worked as a solicitor for four years, which, he says, paid very well but involved long hours. Still he devoted his nights and weekends to writing, producing short stories aimed at developing particular techniques. Gradually these lengthened until in one he saw the bones of a novel and began to research it, spending all his free time in the British Library reading everything he could on 1930s and 1940s Malaysia.
But don't imagine the novel flowed freely from that point; The Harmony Silk Factory took almost five years to complete. Aw spent 18 months just trying to find a structure for his ideas until, inspired by Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, he settled on multiple narrators whose shifting perspectives provide a kaleidoscope of conflicting accounts.
Coinciding with this structural breakthrough was Aw's decision to quit paid work, having saved enough from the law firm to support his writing for a year or so. He also enrolled at the creative-writing program at the University of East Anglia, which has produced the likes of Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. It was, says Aw, a very intense experience: "It sounds ghastly. It really is horrible. It's basically just workshops in which four people's work is discussed. That is handed out in advance and everyone has a week to tear it to pieces and that's what they do."
During his time at UEA, Aw completed The Harmony Silk Factory, which tells the story of Johnny Lim, a Kinta Valley textile magnate who is portrayed as both national hero and traitor for his actions leading up to the Japanese invasion of Malaysia during World War II.
Asked to categorise his novel, Aw responds: "I can't because the whole point of it was to make it indescribable. It was an attempt to refresh and change the whole genre of the Second World War novel. You know it's a historical novel that has the history taken out of it, so it's not laden with historical detail the way these kind of things normally are. It's a war story without the war, there is very little war action in it. It's a love story and a ghost story and a psychological thriller and a road trip all squashed into a form that purports to be a historical war novel."
The book is also a deliberate response to Somerset Maugham's depictions of 1930s and 1940s Malaysia in many of his short stories.
"He wrote hundreds and they are all incredibly bad," says Aw. "They are all exactly the same... They all involve a certain class of Englishman who lives in a particular way. They are all unhappy and slightly screwed up but in a really predictable way; they are all unhappy in the way that posh people are unhappy. Which is all fine, it's just that this view of Malaysia makes everyone think, particularly in England, that Malaysia must have been like that in the 1930s and 1940s. Well, it might have been for a very small number of people but certainly for my family, it wasn't true at all."
In capturing Malaysia, Aw wished to avoid exoticism: "I didn't want to be a chronicler of quaint, faintly exotic Asian customs. There are too many books like that, which languish in a sea of exotica, without paying much attention to plot or characters or innovation of any kind, and which are as predictable as Somerset Maugham."
The Harmony Silk Factory has three sections, each narrated by a different character, each with a different take on Johnny and on events. The first is related by Johnny's son Jasper and depicts his father as a lying, cheating monster; the middle one is recorded by Snow, Johnny's wife, and tells of their belated "honeymoon" trip to the Seven Maiden Islands, chaperoned by an unlikely trio; the final part is written by Peter Wormword, a British colonial who was on the fated voyage to the islands and is now nearing death in a Malaysian nursing home.
What impresses most about this accomplished first novel is the distinctiveness of each first-person voice. Asked which section was the easiest to write, Aw groans: "Oh god, they were all a grind... Right up until I was into Peter's section, I didn't know if it was workable or not."
What Aw will concede was easy was securing a literary agent. Settling on an agency, he sent his manuscript off and heard back within a day: "It was really extraordinary."
Although contractually he's not allowed to discuss his advance, he scoffs at the figure I have read of £500,000 ($A1.2 million): "That's really not true... it's a gross inflation," although he continues somewhat defensively, "but basically, it's a book that took five years to write and once you even it out, I've basically earned less than a school teacher; my hourly rate is not quite KFC but it's getting there."
It is probably fairly obvious by now that Aw is single-minded about his writing and he is not resting on his laurels in the wake of his novel's success. He requested a one-book deal and is not under contract with his second novel, so there is no official deadline looming. How much grace time does he think The Harmony Silk Factory has earned him? "Nothing, basically. I still feel really insecure. I'm just really anxious to get on with the next book."
That will be about Malaysia and Indonesia in the 1960s and he's just about finished researching it. Now comes the writing stage, which he approaches with great discipline, sitting down at his desk each morning: "I try not to budge until I've got 500 words - and 1000 words are a high-water mark and anything more than that is a huge bonus."
While Aw's years in the workforce may have delayed his literary success, he doesn't regret them. "I think it's really good training. The writers who have had some kind of real-life job always seem to have a greater grasp of what to do in order to succeed as a writer... They tend to be more disciplined and more professional and all these things increase the likelihood of being published. Because, you know, I think a lot of people like the idea of being a writer but they're just not really prepared to put in the graft. Because it is really hard work, more often than not, it's like going to the office."
It seems that in following his vocation, Aw has also found a profession.
The Harmony Silk Factory is published by HarperCollins at $29.95.