It was a Friday evening just after dinnertime. A dozen readers sat elbow-to-elbow around a long makeshift discussion table. They were eager for the meet and greet opportunity with Tan Twan Eng, the writer of The Gift of Rain. He sat in the middle, his eyes shinning from behind wire-rimmed glasses, his youthful face beaming a smile, though with lips closed in a line. Comfortable but not completely relaxed. As though heartened to be there but inhibited and isolated by the glare of the attention.

Very quickly, praises poured in from around the table. “I like the book,” “It’s an exciting story,” and “The Japanese tortures are very real.” Over the next 75 minutes these fans, with their personal copies of the novel opened in front of them, threw questions at Tan and drank his words.

Because beyond the compelling coming-of-age story set in World War 2 Malaya of a half-Chinese, half-English Philip Arminius Khoo-Hutton, there is much to like about this well written novel—the elegant prose (the sometimes meditative rhythm, the choice metaphors), the choreography of fights, the hint of mysticism, the re-creation of locales both familiar and strange at the same time. The story is told by the aging Hutton to Michiko Murakami, the equally old former lover of the now dead Hayato Endo, Hutton’s aikijutsu sensei when he was a sixteen-year-old. This framed story earns Tan’s first novel a favourable comparison to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (which is also set in Malaya but at the end of the 19th century) because he successfully deploys it and underscores the elusiveness of truth and certainty as it melts the line between the story and the storyteller.

This narrative form draws as much attention to the narrator as to the story he tells and it compels us to question the reliability of the tale being told. Not necessarily the facts of memory as narrated, if facts exist at all, but rather the colour of the narrator’s palate, the choices of strokes he uses to strike across the canvas as he paints the past. What has he highlighted to call our attention? What has he muted and darkened to make our eyes gloss over? What is he certain about and what not?

Interestingly enough, Tan often situates Hutton’s various storytelling meetings with Murakami at dawn or dusk, the bewitching hours when low light and soft long shadows can play tricks on the eyes, and blinking revises what was seen. The lush tropical vegetation swaying in the breeze also only gives glimpses of shifting truths. And it is in this way that young Hutton presents his relationship with Endo who is a stranger, a teacher, a mentor, a friend, an opportunist, and an enemy. Endo is a person he respects and holds dearly, and also a person he holds at a distance because he is also a member of the invading army.

In one of these storytelling meetings, as Hutton unfolds to Murakami of his dinner with Endo several months after beginning his martial arts training, he says: “[Endo] was so close to me that each breathe he expelled, I took, and every breath that I surrendered, he possessed. I waited for him to continue, to quieten the sudden turmoil within me. As I heard his breathing I knew the next step would be dependent on me, and so, putting my feet firmly on the path I would take, I leaned forward and received another offering from his hand.

”On another later occasion, the young Hutton imagines a life with his master which in reality he could not entertain. “Thoughts floated like intoxicated butterflies: of taking care of him, preparing his meals, spending the rest of my life learning under his guidance; thoughts which would always remain thoughts, never becoming real, when even to acknowledge him in public was fraught with risks. So many things most people take for granted.” It is understandable that Hutton shies away from any public acknowledge of his relationship with Endo, a member of the despised occupying race; but it is also understandable that at sixteen, he does not know to name what he feels.

These words we hear from Hutton are like words heard over the crashing sound of a tropical downpour in the jungle mixed with the loud rustling of leaves whipped by the wind. A word here, a word there and we are left to piece things together when only half certain of what we have heard, only half sure of what we think we know since these are words spoken by an older Hutton who might be recollecting memories or recreating them.

And that’s the strength and appeal of Tan’s novel. He successfully paints a portrait and while we see the man—Philip Hutton or Endo or both—we are only half sure what it is we’re seeing and what we know about them. No one around the makeshift discussion table was ready to make a pronouncement whether Philip Hutton was a collaborator, a hero or a pragmatist; or whether Endo was an opportunist, a victim or something else altogether. Or whether they were lovers.


The Gift of Rain is published by Myrmidon Books Ltd at RM79.90