On The Surface

Not quite sure what to make of Karina Robles Bahrin's The Accidental Malay, which I finished reading today. Tash Aw reasonably refers to it as slick and sharp, (as quoted on the front cover, no less) and it's certainly not a difficult read, but I came away from it with a sense of mild disappointment over what it doesn't do. Now that's a bit unfair, I guess, but when a novel consciously sets out to deal with matters of identity, both racial and religious, in a part of the world in which those terms are pretty loaded, it does create expectations of some kind of weight, gravity, depth, whatever. And that's what's missing here.

Of course, if the writer has set out to deal with a world of surfaces then fair enough. But I get the sense that she shares her protagonist's view, or views, of the world and these seem based on fairly narrow stereotypes to this reader. And it doesn't help that the sort of triangular love affair at the centre of the plot reads like an essay in wish-fulfilment. Is it really possible that two guys as nice, decent and filthy rich as Jasmine Leong's boyfriends exist outside the pages of women's magazines (or telly dramas)? Oh, and she's also very rich and a highly capable CEO, though we rarely see her actually at work.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for voicing coruscating criticisms of all belief systems. It's a fine way of testing them out. But I looked in vain for a voice to counter this generalisation, which is fairly typical of the text, voiced by the identity-threatened protagonist, but springing originally from a disenchanted Malay source: Us Chinese, even the Indians, we come from elsewhere much larger than this tiny peninsula. Thousands of years of history. Not like them. The Malays... only have this. Oh dear. Where do I start?

I suppose I'm hoping for the big blockbuster novel in English from Malaysia or Singapore or Indonesia, that blows the reader's head off in terms of capturing the sheer glorious plurality of it all and seeks to undermine all the glistening or, for that matter, mundane surfaces that hold us in. I reckon there's a fair chance we'll get it in my lifetime.