Customer Reviews

The Long Day Wanes. A Malayan Trilogy

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This ranks as one of the funniest books ever written, while being at the same time a social history of Malaysia, or Malaya as it was known under British Rule. The first book of the trilogy deals with the last days of British colonialism (hence the title "The Long Day Wanes") through the misadventures of a remittance man named Nabby Adams, a civil servant, his wife, household staff, and local government characters. The second novel follows the civil servant and his failing marriage through the guerilla years in the struggling nation, and the third is The Coming of the Americans. These three events have been a sort of template for late 20th century global affairs. It's a tight trilogy that reflects historical and social changes through its characters in the satirical literary slapstick characteristic of Burgess at his best. If you've never read Burgess, this is the place to start. It will bring you an appreciation of "where he's coming from," literally: it is based upon his experiences as a British Civil Servant in the waning days of the Empire (upon which the sun set 30 June 1997 with the cession of Hong Kong to Red China). This review was originally published in June 1997 and with some site changes, my name got lost and Amazon was unable to transfer the review with my name attached, so this is a reprint of that earlier one.

One thing I have always admired about Anthony Burgess's novels is the compassion that he quietly conveys for his characters. They are all flawed: imperfect archetypes, reluctant saviours, apologetic swearers, gin mixed in with the orange crush. And we recognize ourselves in them all for this essential humanity, their endless struggle or acquiescence, for or against their unlikely fates. Burgess's humour is rueful and sharp: wistful disappointment and calm despair are the backdrop for his characters' heroic protests or desperate affairs.

He also writes with a playfulness and intelligence that shines through every page. His sentences are as angular and memorable as his characters. His debts to Joyce and Shakespeare unite in his own unique style.

The Long Day Wanes shows much of Burgess at his best, his setting and characters memorable vehicles for their fates and larger themes. The setting in Malaya is a world apart: inner struggles against human desires, social forces against cultural divides. While writing of a world that fast disappears, he tells us a story old as the Malayan jungle.

Burgess has achieved something remarkable in this trilogy in penetrating the mentality of the Chinese, Indian, Malays, Eurasians and British colonialists who inhabited the pre-independence Malaya of the 1950's. He cleverly dissects his vast repertoire of characters, from the lowest Tamil night watchman, Malay driver or Chinese towkay, to the highest Malay prince or most gin-soddened British official, in the most unpatronising way with bucket loads of humour and insight.

Being British and having lived in Malaysia and Singapore for the past eleven years, I can deeply identify with the (alas, now imaginary) world of these three closely interlinked novels. It's a colourful cosmos which has sadly been erased forever by the forces of globalisation (that is to say, 'Americanisation'). In a sense, the erosion of the traditional ways and the coming of change and modernisation (not necessarily for the better) is one of the themes of the trilogy and a preface to the modern life of Southeast Asia, a place more of computers, stock markets and western style conspicuous consumption than a place of shady kedai, gin stengahs on cool verandahs or mysterious Wayang Kulit shows.

As a postscript to the Malayan trilogy, you should also refer to the second volume of Burgess's autobiography in which he relates a visit, many years later, to this much-changed locale and is accosted in the northern Malaysian town of Ipoh by a young Chinese girl selling him not her body, but a western brand of evangelical Christianity.

This ranks as one of the funniest books ever written, while being at the same time a social history of Malaysia, or Malaya as it was known under British Rule. The first book of the trilogy deals with the last days of British colonialism (hence the title "The Long Day Wanes") through the misadventures of a remittance man named Nabby Adams, a civil servant, his wife, household staff, and local government characters. The second novel follows the civil servant and his failing marriage through the guerilla years in the struggling nation, and the third is The Coming of the Americans. These three events have been a sort of template for late 20th century global affairs. It's a tight trilogy that reflects historical and social changes through its characters in the satirical literary slapstick characteristic of Burgess at his best. If you've never read Burgess, this is the place to start. It will bring you an appreciation of "where he's coming from," literally: it is based upon his experiences as a British Civil Servant in the waning days of the Empire (upon which the sun sets this 30 June with the cession of Hong Kong to Red China)

Anthony Burgess was quite a character. Anyone familiar in the least with his life and work or who has read, say, the first volume of his Autobiography is aware of his splendid cussedness. He was also polymathic and erudite in the extreme. He's one of the few writers who read and reread and had (as well as any human being is capable) a grasp of Finnegans Wake - As his alter ego, Crabbe, muses to himself here, "Everything in Finnegans Wake made sense eventually, if one waited for it."---He was also, of course, a gifted composer and many other things.

The motive for my mentioning this personal information is that this "Malayan Trilogy" is highly autobiographical, and it adds verisimilitude (ach, what a dashed clunky but apt word) and zest to the reading of it to know a bit about its author. But, of course, one really need not know a thing about Burgess to enjoy his work.

In it, Burgess, in the form of Crabbe and other characters, doesn't fail to put his interests in language and musical composition etc. on display. But what really makes this book more than a pale copy of a Somerset Maugham work - Crabbe reflects, at one point, that he is the epitome of a character out of a Maugham short story - is the cantankerous humour and brio which enliven the book. It's not MERELY the gin-sodden Brit expats being swallowed into the jungle to which they came, ostensibly, to bring the "rule of law", but also a glowingly absurd and tragic account of the interactions between people and peoples, between husbands and wives, between rulers and ruled, all written in a way that, well, only Burgess could write.

Yes, I agree with the other reviewers, the Amaricanisation of what is now called Malaysia is a sad thing. - No more eccentrics in their linen flannels quaffing gin on their verandahs before noontide. - But, truly, the saddest thing is that there aren't any writers of Burgess's stripe around now to chronicle such things so richly.

Anthony Burgess' brilliant satire and mastery of linguistics become apparent and used at their best in this trilogy about the final days of British imperialism.

Burgess' use of social satire contextually set in the lives of a few warped individuals (as he did in Honey for the Bears, A Clockwork Orange, the Enderby tales and others)returns in this edgy but brilliant and amussing trilogy relating the end of Bristish imperialism on the Asian continent.

He runs with themes such as the predjudice of the white Europeans, and the reverse predjudice of the people that they had formally ruled over. These stories talk about a civil servent working as a teacher and trying to make a change in the lives of people who are already changing their own world as they give the boot the their one time British task masters.

The teacher turned administrator, Victor Crabbe, tries desperately to keep control of his own eroding life as he sees the rotting of the systems created by the British many years before. His own fall is much like the one that the British empire took, and like the workers in the empire: he tries to help and reform things after it is too late for him to cause any positive effect.

Crabbe wants to unite the different Asian ethnic groups that are taking control of Malaya (Malaysia now), but the only thing that they can agree upon is their hatred for the white man and also their hatred of each other.

This tale is edgy and gritty but at the same time, Burgess' wonderful wit and humor come shining through. Tragic and sad one minute, and absurdly funny the next, the one thing that "The Long Day Wanes" always has is brilliance and insight into the human condition.

A delightful and moving trilogy, "The Long Day Wanes" runs with Burgess' style in that he constantly plays with dialect and word games. The comedy of language and the way that people communicate (or fail to do so) is a constant theme in Anthony Burgess' work, and this trilogy makes sure to keep that alive and well; even if it is only a small facet of this masterpiece.

I found this an absorbing, literary read, and like the other reviewers I first read this while living out East (in the 90s - Hong Kong & S'pore). I am amazed on re-reading it how many of the actions and attitudes of the characters - British, Malay, Indian, Chinese, American - along with so many of the secondary details, were still relevant and recognizable among Easterners and Western expats of today. The main story makes fine reading, too. In fine language, Anthony Burgess (who was a colonial civil servant in Malaya and spoke Malay) describes the last few years of British rule and the troubled handover to independance. There is a lot of enjoyable detail about life in the Malay peninsula at the time - many good scenes and vignettes, but what comes across clearly by the end is the uneasiness and ambiguity felt by Burgess about the future of independant Malaya and Singapore - he is worried about the hatred of the various ethnic communities for each other and the slim hold of British law, also the lack of interest among educated locals (besides the ones with marketable skills and talents who emigrated to new lives and identities in the First World) for anything other than technological development. Many of these concerns have sadly been born out - the split between Malaysia and Singapore, the second class status of the Malays in S'pore, of the Chinese in Malaysia, of the Indians in both places, the soulessness of the modern nightlife of KL and S'pore. Law in Malaysia is today a farce - witnewess the treatment of the politician Anwar, once Prime Minister Mahathir's 2nd-in-command, put in the dock seemingly forever for what was known in Singapore as "the endless buggery trial"; and Singapore under Harry Lee Kuan Yew has an even worse legal system (read Christopher Lingle's account, *Singapore's Authoritarin Capitalism*, or Francis Seow's, *A Dissident in Lee Kuan Yew's Prisons*). But this is a vivid, funny and moving novel above all - perhaps especially so if you have any connection with that part of the world, but of course it works brilliantly also if you're just looking for a good, cracking read. The thing I remember thinking after reading this was how sad it is that so many talented Malaysians and Singaporeans emigrate to other countries to get away from the sad realities at home. Burgess forsaw some of this, as well as much more. This is a classic about Malaya/Singapore the same way Paul Theroux's *Kowloon Tong* so accurately describes Hong Kong at the end (for which it was given the honor of being banned by China). Time for a Tiger!

I would rate this as my favourite Malaysian novel, even though it was written by a mat salleh (Caucasian) before Malaysia came into existence in 1963. But Anthony Burgess was no ordinary mat salleh: a polymath who never seemed to try too hard, he spent six years of his life here and left behind this novel; lucky us.

For starters, there's the wide range of characters, of every possible Peninsula ethnicity. It's the most vibrant depiction yet of our Truly Asian but multi-racist society. The jokey, pomposity-puncturing allusions to local mores and hypocrisies have not gone stale. Even the Malay names of places are often rude, which is something that the average English reader wouldn't have possibly realised when reading it; so it's like a gift to us.

This novel has not proved popular among humourless local academics, who find it patronising. What they willfully ignore is that the depiction of the whites here is often more scathing, with enough booze and adultery to keep any daytime soap-opera going for months.

Burgess represents varied Malayan voices with a musician's ear, a humourist's lightness of touch, and a wounded idealist's moral rigour. Many of the jokes come from racial caricatures that we can recognise from our daily conversations and from cruder subsequent works.

I don't mean to grant Burgess any divine mythic powers, but it's amazing how eerily prescient the book is. For example, there`s a deathbed controversy of the theological nature, which could have been wrenched straight from today's headlines. But although the mood grows darker (along with Crabbe's) as Merdeka (Independence) approaches, there's still a heedless optimism in the portrayal of how the younger generation chooses to bond.

The Malayan Trilogy is a rambunctious and colourful performance of heat and lust, with the comic bathos of downpours always on hand to quench any potential high-mindedness. It should be made a compulsory text at school, as long as the teachers aren't prudes who will latah (panic and stutter) at the lewd words.

Still the standard thing for expats in Malaysia, and very familiar in its depiction of the various races (so-called) of the country. But its very familiarity should set off alarm bells--why do we all think we "know" these things? In fact the trilogy mystifies the larger picture, whereby the admittedly funny and often spot-on details on the surface and the "universal" human failings (the standard bromide of middlebrow literature) paper over an ignorance about the creation of exactly these "natural" racial categories by British policies, which allowed the British to maintain enormous economic benefits while helping to bring on the Emergency and distorting Malaysian politics to this day. The "timelessness" that we're supposed to see giving way to modernity (through sheer British generosity, of course!) is another cliche about other parts of the world, and a very silly one at that, as though Westerners hold a patent on dynamism or change. For a history teacher Victor Crabbe apparently knows little about history. Burgess, as so often, is linguistically brilliant, funny, and good on the trivial details but not terribly bright in his larger arguments.

I run hot & cold on Burgess (mainly warmish). This was a burner.

The characters were "real" people with "real" foibles. The humor wasn't forced but found in the out-of-ordinary events of ordinary folks.

This is a great starting place for readers new to Burgess.