From The Outside

Managed to get going on Yeng Pway Ngon's Art Studio after a shaky start and found myself happily swept along by its various intertwining narratives. My initial problems related to the novelist's rapid cross-cutting between what seemed a bewildering array of characters in the opening pages, compounded by my struggles in remembering and differentiating between the Chinese names involved. Yes, that sounds pathetic, and it's meant to, reflecting as it does my ignorance of a crucially important aspect of the culture of these parts. In truth, all I needed was to keep going to realise that what appeared a bewildering array was actually a small, loosely connected group and each story was quite clear enough in its way, with two proving unusually gripping - these being the most melancholy of a generally downbeat volume: the tale of the Teacher Yan Pei, in some ways the archetype of the suffering artist; and the account of the almost surreal flight of Jian Xiong into a kind of jungle exile to escape detention over his political associations. This second narrative involved two quite extraordinary sequences involving the experience of dying, both unexpected and quite beautifully achieved.

The most powerful segments of the novel for this reader involved the writer's steely-eyed focus on matters of physical decay and decrepitude, best realised in the evocation of Yan Pei's illness which dominated the central portions of the text. The grim, dreary details of his prostate cancer gripped me in a positively unnerving fashion, enough to make me uneasily aware I need to go for a health screening myself, and, let's face it, it doesn't get more real than that. Yeng is also very good at dealing with loneliness and isolation; his characters are never that far from losing their place in the world even when they seem to be prospering.

The rather melodramatic aspects of the novel struck me as somewhat curious - at least two coincidental encounters seeming positively Dickensian in their fortuitousness. I wasn't sure to what degree the sense of the heavy hand of fate intervening in the characters' lives was meant to be seen as saying something serious about the nature of reality or was operating as simply a kind of self-conscious literary trope. I suppose this was one of the reasons I never felt quite at home in this world despite recognising a number of its features.

In line with this response, I also found myself strongly aware of the very Singaporean features of the English translation, though these seemed appropriate given the background of the novelist. The colloquial flow was appealing, though I found myself wondering whether this was a reflection of the tone of Yeng's original. That's part of the fascination of being such an outsider, the sense of never being quite sure you've really got the point even when you've managed to gain some degree of entry into another world.