In The Garden

Been making slow progress reading my latest novel, Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists. I first read about it when it was shortlisted for the Booker and felt almost obliged to read it - a Malaysian writer getting close to the big one! Also it sounded interesting in terms of its subject matter. The period of the Emergency is a fascinating one and has been too rarely treated in fiction.

So why so slow? It isn't that the novel is particularly difficult to read, being resolutely conventional in its shaping of the narrative. And there are many very fine moments, like the one I've just read about the execution of Captain Hideyoshi, as witnessed by the central character Teoh Yun Ling. The descriptions of the natural world are uniformly fine, if a touch consciously poetic. Yet something isn't entirely cohering for me.

I think the problem may lie in my lack of sympathy for the protagonist, though I'm not at all sure why I feel so negatively towards her. Could it be that I don't really believe in her, despite the writer's manifest craft? Something about the novel feels very staged, somehow.