War — and the way a father took part in it — plays a pivotal role in “The Harmony Silk Factory” (Riverhead, 384 pages, $24.95), an ambitious and accomplished debut novel by Tash Aw, a Malaysian writer of Chinese descent now living in London.
Narrated from three points of view that have scarcely any overlap in the way they see the novel’s central character, “The Harmony Silk Factory” is the story of textile merchant Johnny Lim, a boy from out of the swamps of British colonial Malaya who rose to become a powerful, fear-inducing business mogul following the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II.
In the case of Johnny’s son Jasper, “fear-inducing” should be corrected to “hate- inducing.” Jasper, who narrates the first third of the book, sees his father as “a liar, a cheat, a traitor and a skirt-chaser,” a murderer and a communist, as well as (Jasper rants on) “short, squat, uncommunicative, a hopelessly bald loner with poor social skills.”
Aw’s writing skills, by contrast, are so seductive that you can hardly wait to get to know this “monster,” especially given the author’s nicely planted hints that Jasper, behind his barbed disdain and arrogance, may be missing vital information about his father. The bigger Johnny is built up in Jasper’s mind, the less real he becomes: “otherworldly, not flesh and blood at all but a phantom.”
Jasper’s grasp of the character of his mother, Snow, is no less histrionic: “She was magical, compelling and full of love, and I have no memory of her.” That’s because she died giving birth to him. But a diary recording her early days of marriage survives. And it serves, in the novel’s middle third, to contradict most of what came before it. In it, we see Johnny shrink to a peripheral, pathetic figure with command over almost nothing in his life.
A belated honeymoon for Johnny and his wife (with three male chaperones! — two British, one Japanese) results in shipwreck on an uninhabited island off Malaya where sexual tensions spark in every direction. It all adds up to a heady brew.
But is Snow’s account any more accurate about the mysterious Johnny than Jasper’s?
In the final third of the novel, narrated by Peter Wormwood — one of the two British honeymoon chaperones — we meet a Johnny far cannier than we get from either Jasper or Snow. We also see half the ground rules that we thought were guiding this narrative turned upside down.
Tash Aw has pulled off a splendid trick. While making the enigma of Johnny more vivid as he goes from one narrator to the next, he has studiously avoided explaining him. Instead, the purpose of the book seems to be to use Johnny’s mystery as a way to illuminate the Malay world around him, even as the man himself disappears inside his contradictions. The resulting novel is as disorienting as it is pleasurable, as satisfying as it is inconclusive.