Quotes of the Day

Malaysia is a land rich in farmers, civil servants and electronics assembly workers, but poor in novelists. That's an odd deficit, given the country's high levels of literacy, prosperity and anxiety, as well as an abundance of history, politics, ethnic tension and other delicate topics that can be used as material. All of which makes Tash Aw's debut novel worthy of close inspection.

The first major work of fiction written in English by a Malaysian about his country in recent memory, Aw's The Harmony Silk Factory has won enthusiastic reviews since its publication in March in the U.S. and the U.K. Foreign rights have been sold in nearly a dozen countries, and the book will appear in Asia in June. Malaysians looking for insights into their country's modern condition may be disappointed. Other readers may find themselves enjoyably lost in a land of magic and mayhem.

The book is about Lim Seng Chin, a.k.a. Johnny Lim, a poor boy of Hakka roots who rises to become a communist agent, then a Japanese collaborator and eventually the wealthiest man in the tin-laden Kinta Valley during and after World War II. The "factory" is a nondescript shophouse Johnny buys in 1942 to serve as home and headquarters for his many business schemes. "Our house was not the kind of place just anyone could visit," writes Johnny's only son Jasper, the first of the book's three narrators. "To be invited, you had to be like my father—that is to say, you had to be a liar, a cheat, a traitor, and a skirt chaser. Of the very highest order."

Having grown up tracking his father's venality, Jasper has little use for the man. But two other observers provide a less sinister account. Snow Soong, daughter of the biggest Chinese tin magnate in the valley, is a willowy beauty whom Johnny woos and weds through guile and determination. Barely a year later Snow dies giving birth to Jasper, but not before producing a diary that forms the second narrative. It depicts Johnny as a clueless bumpkin whom she can't wait to ditch, probably for a suave, handsome Japanese professor named Kunichika who has befriended her parents.

Snow also describes an episode Jasper overlooks: a bizarre honeymoon she and her new husband take to the mysterious Seven Maidens islands somewhere off the Malaysian coast. For complicated reasons, the pair are accompanied by Kunichika and by Peter Wormwood, an effete young Englishman trying to tutor Johnny in the ways of the rich and British. Wormwood, the third narrator, writing years after Johnny's death, reveals all—about the murder of a British mine operator on the trip, about Kunichika's sinister connections to the Japanese troops then poised to invade the Malay peninsula, and about Johnny's growing anguish over his reluctant bride. In Wormwood's literate and lively account, Johnny is a likable, slightly pathetic figure battered by the forces of British colonialism, Japanese militarism and, finally, his own greed.

The Harmony Silk Factory doesn't strain to be The Great Malaysian Novel. That's a deliberate decision by Aw, 33, who considers himself "100% Malaysian," though born in Taipei (to Malaysian-Chinese parents), raised in Kuala Lumpur, educated at Cambridge and now resident in London. "I didn't set out to incorporate any particularly Malaysian themes," Aw said from New York City, where he was on a promotional tour. "My intention was to demolish the Malaysian historical novel of the 1930s and '40s, as influenced by Somerset Maugham. You know, the idea that there are only two versions of Malaysia in literature—a place where white men sit around drinking pink gin, and a place full of colorful people doing quaint things. I wanted to write a book that didn't depend on settings."

Okay-lah. Yet the sleepy, soggy Kinta Valley comes alive in Aw's fluid prose, and the mythical Seven Maidens are as idyllic as any Malaysian isles. World War II and the cloud of collaboration hang over Johnny and his country, while the absurdities of British rule clearly shape his urge to become rich and cultured. Of course, these are concerns shared by people throughout Asia, Africa and other places who have known foreign domination and who have their own quiet valleys and lush islands to treasure in this age of onrushing development. Aw's triumph is to have produced a tale of love and betrayal that transcends mere location. His luck is to have set it in a country so unused to fiction that it can mean many things to many readers, while remaining exotic to all.

• Donald Morrison
• Tash Aw didn't set out to write The Great Malaysian Novel, but to prove Somerset Maugham wrong