STATE OF EMERGENCY, historical novel about Singapore, Malaya, and how Malaysia came to be

STATE OF EMERGENCY
JEREMY TIANG
World Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.99 trade paper

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Siew Li leaves her husband and children in Tiong Bahru to fight for freedom in the jungles of Malaya. Decades later, a Malaysian journalist returns to her homeland to uncover the truth of a massacre committed during the Emergency. And in Singapore, Siew Li's niece Stella finds herself accused of being a Marxist conspirator.

Jeremy Tiang's debut novel dives into the tumultuous days of leftist movements and political detentions in Singapore and Malaysia. It follows an extended family from the 1940s to the present day as they navigate the choppy political currents of the region. What happens when the things that divide us also bind us together?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: What happens when a woman dedicates herself to The Cause (whichever one it might be)? The kind of dedication that requires her to leave family behind, the way men have for millennia? She gets special treatment, in the worst sense of the words "special" when she is caught by the apparatus of state repression. That apparatus crushes communist cadres for the British Empire, then the state that became Malaysia, because heaven knows we can't have people thinking they have rights, deserve consultation on the way they'll be governed, any of that disorderly democratic foolishness! The people don't know (ever, according to their rulers) what is good for them! We'll have to lock 'em up and torture 'em for a while. How long? Who asked you, foreigner, to butt into our business?! Hand over some money so we can torture a few people you don't like, shut up and go away.

Authoritarians all have their eyes on the same hymnal, their hands in the same pot, and their souls AWOL. Doesn't matter the name of their "belief/political system" because they in themselves do not change.

Now that you're all ready for the read...understand that the prose is good but simple (Something heavy was settling onto her, an unpleasant awareness that the world was aslant and she was at the higher end. What could she do?), the characters are good but simple, the world they want to create is good but simple. I learned a good deal about the Emergency, something I wasn't very familiar with compared to the contemporaneous Viet Cong insurgency against the French. Unsurprising from a US reader...and also clear proof British propaganda efforts to keep the monster of American public opinion far away from the fraying Empire's horrific abuses.

There are six loosely linked PoVs in the story. It isn't the smoothest narrative technique but, for this time-hopping story, it works to the advantage of the tale of the Emergency as it develops and resonates through this clan's life. You'll need to be aware of who is addressing you to fully invest in their story, but it is not made difficult for you by Author Tiang. No unusual demands on your concentration are made, no mid-narrative jumps or other such Woolfian stuff; making it into Orlando: A Biography is not his aim.

I found its structure and its voice very easy to immerse myself into, allowing new information to settle into the places I lacked it. I was surprised to learn that women would be aware of what awaited them but still join the rebels. Sexist assumptions are hard to shed, clearly. Very much an ongoing project and welcome to find it reinforced here.

I'm ready for Author Tiang's next book whenever it comes. He has that thing no one can teach: Seeing his story through to its own ends. Nothing forced or misplaced. I'd've bestowed that fifth star had he done a tad bit more to signal how the interconnections really worked, but that isn't a full-star-off offense.

BEASTS OF A LITTLE LAND, a beautiful read to disassemble one's complacency...its time come at last

BEASTS OF A LITTLE LAND
JUHEA KIM
Ecco (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.49 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

From BBC's World Book Club: Juhea Kim's...dazzling debut novel Beasts of a Little Land is a powerful historical novel that intertwines Korea’s fight for independence with deeply personal narratives of love, survival, and ambition. Spanning decades from the early 20th century...offers a richly detailed exploration of class struggles, colonialism, and shifting power dynamics, all centred on the tale of two friends who refuse to let one another go despite all the hardship they endure. We love this book because it’s an astonishing historical epic, dealing with love, war, the will to survive in any situation, written in beautiful, often dreamlike prose.

Harriett (the host) will be recording with Ottessa (Moshfegh) on Wednesday 2nd July (2025) so we need your questions for 26th June at the latest to be featured. Email to worldbookclub@bbc.co.uk

The Publisher Says: An epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement, following the intertwined fates of a young girl sold to a courtesan school and the penniless son of a hunter

In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished local hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. In an instant, their fates are connected—and from this encounter unfolds a saga that spans half a century.

In the aftermath, a young girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver’s courtesan school, an act of desperation that will cement her place in the lowest social status. When she befriends an orphan boy named JungHo, who scrapes together a living begging on the streets of Seoul, they form a deep friendship. As they come of age, JungHo is swept up in the revolutionary fight for independence, and Jade becomes a sought-after performer with a new romantic prospect of noble birth. Soon Jade must decide whether she will risk everything for the one who would do the same for her.

From the perfumed chambers of a courtesan school in Pyongyang to the glamorous cafes of a modernizing Seoul and the boreal forests of Manchuria, where battles rage, Juhea Kim’s unforgettable characters forge their own destinies as they wager their nation’s. Immersive and elegant, Beasts of a Little Land unveils a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviors, heroes are persecuted, and beasts take many shapes.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Starting an historical novel with a hunting scene is pretty much a statement of intent: We're heading into conflict! There's nothing about this going to be smooth and easy!

It isn't, for the characters at least. The value of self to family, to society; the value of individuation, personal or political; the value of loyalty, fidelity, honor: All strands in this novel's braid. What keeps these weighty themes from becoming burdensome to follow is the resonant writing.

It appeared to him that no matter how much he gave, he would always have more than enough. As he grew older, he even relished the struggles brought on by his sacrifices. There was a soaring awareness that illuminated his soul whenever he did the right thing, which also cost him something. This euphoria, however, was balanced by the utter terror he felt when he looked around and saw so many others to whom this consciousness was not only absent, but unknowable and abhorrent. Most people, MyungBo realized, were made of a different material than his, and it was not something that could shift, as from coldness to warmth, but an elemental and fundamental difference, like wood from metal.

This is, in my reading ear, the musing of a smart man on an immutable truth that does not ever appear the same way from person to person preceiving it; and, in his musing, retaining that awareness. I rang like a bell to this soft hammer striking me.

Current event make this read all the more trenchant. The world has never lacked people or peoples hard done by, consigned to lesser states of being than is their natural right by some standard or quality invented, "discovered," or detected without evidence of its relevance or importance. This passage in history, well, if I really need to spell it out for you I don't want to. This novel has a thriving culture that is suddenly deemed inferior, much to their mass outraged disbelief; this invented inferiority excuses a colonial oppression that has as its purpose eradicating a people's soul to be replaced with their oppressors' vision of perfect slaves.

And that, I expect you already know, is a hateful, criminal enterprise with many, many collaborators inside the edifice being created, as well as...much more terribly...many times more outside. When the day arrives that the false and ill-fitting, ramshackle and improvised, structure collapses, things brak and shatter and split and buckle in random-seeming shapes without patterns. Lives and loves and entire branches of family history jumble in lethal chaos, not every deat physical.

It might be the psychological ones that cause the most suffering.

What Juhea Kim has done for us is map that chaos onto one family of highly effective people who still can't save their lives, their loves, their lands without unthinkable suffering rippling out from the Korean nation's convulsive death-agonies, its multiplicity of death-agonies, and find in that chaos the undetected in the time of crisis pattern that supports random bits of the past just enough to provide the seeds for pearls to come, yet to come.

In 2024, this rread, beautiful for and in itself, means so much more than it did when it came out in 2021. It can speak its truth of betrayal and cruelty into a landscape more like itself; more like the one that needs to hear that truth said without rage or outrage or plangent pleading blame-shoving. I'd love for everyone I know, everyone I can reach, to at the least try this lovely flower's powerful fruit.

Please.

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA, entrepreneurship's dark side

HOW TO GET FILTHY RICH IN RISING ASIA
MOHSIN HAMID
Riverhead Books
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: His first two novels established Mohsin Hamid as a radically inventive storyteller with his finger on the world’s pulse. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia meets that reputation and exceeds it. The astonishing and riveting tale of a man’s journey from impoverished rural boy to corporate tycoon, it steals its shape from the business self-help books devoured by ambitious youths all over “rising Asia.” It follows its nameless hero to the sprawling metropolis where he begins to amass an empire built on that most fluid, and increasingly scarce, of goods: water. Yet his heart remains set on something else: on the pretty girl whose star rises along with his, their paths crossing and recrossing, a lifelong affair sparked and snuffed and sparked again by the forces that careen their fates along.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia is a striking slice of contemporary life at a time of crushing upheaval. Romantic without being sentimental, political without being didactic, and spiritual without being religious, it brings an unflinching gaze to the violence and hope it depicts. And it creates two unforgettable characters who find moments of transcendent intimacy in the midst of shattering change.

THE PUBLISHER PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY OF THIS BOOK AT MY REQUEST. THANKS!

My Review: An internationally flavored mash-up of Death of a Salesman and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.

I liked both of those stories, and this one too. I got tired of the second-person gag way early, and it took most of a month to read the book because of that.

What I most appreciated about the book was Hamid's gift for the pithy aperçu:

We are all refugees from our childhoods.

Readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves.

The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they’re not particularly fattening.

I love this sort of distilled wisdom. I like the way Hamid feeds it to his readers, in logical places, in small bites, in the course of telling the story. He doesn't set his gems in solitaires but parures. It makes for a richer reading experience this way.

Reading is a subject of interest in this book, the characters read and discuss reading-the-act as well as what they have read. The point of reading is a major revelation within the book:

Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

It is exactly this that makes reading, moreso than watching, such a dangerous and subversive act, one that threatens tyrants throughout history. It is also exactly this that powers anti-intellectualism throughout history: The ability to decode and derive layers of meaning from a text is hugely threatening to people who aren't educationally or intellectually prepared for it. They can't see what you see...therefore YOU must be wrong and YOU are The Enemy.

But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.

An unnervingly sharp eye for the realities at ground level makes that a gift, if one is willing to receive it, from Hamid to culturally isolated US readers. He isn't likely to be around when you use the gift he's given you. Novelists, after all, are ephemeral culturally speaking. Think I'm wrong? How often does anyone you know speak of Ellen Glasgow or Erskine Caldwell? Influential in their times, they're forgotten and unread by the mass of Americans today. Much as I love reading, the visual media are (bizarrely to me) longer lasting in their impact on the cultural discussion. Many more film directors of similar impact to Caldwell or Glasgow are remembered and discussed today, eg Alfred Hitchcock.

But it's a gift nonetheless:

From the perspective of the world's national security apparatuses you exist in several locations. You appear on property and income-tax registries, on passport and ID card databases. You show up on passenger manifests and telephone logs . . . You are fingertip swirls, facial ratios, dental records, voice patterns, spending trails, e-mail threads.

This is a very stark reality. Everyone leaves a paper trail. Its existence is part of daily life in developed countries and its immense data store includes essentially the entire world. It is an ever-growing monster, The Blob writ large.

Here, though, is the inescapable conclusion that we learn from the data being crunched:

In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.

It is this force that will form the world of tomorrow. It is history being made, reported by storyteller Hamid. It is your future, white America, read it and learn.