It is clear that the years Burgess spent in Malaya had been rich and varied; more so because of his fine attunement to the country's unique mosaic of multiple races and cultures, combined with the vast capacity for absorption of a relentlessly curious polymath. Therein might also lie the flaw of the trilogy: its lack of focus, the scantiness of some the characters and the slackness of plot.

However, by the time you reached the final book, the sentences have gotten better and the humour had acquired somewhat of the edge so sharp in A Clockwork Orange.

Una bella immersione in una Malesia che non esiste più..è mai esistita?
No 5 stelle perché non ho finito le ultime 50 pagine, allungate oltre misura..

In these three novels set in the Federation of Malaya in the run-up to Independence in 1957, Anthony Burgess, through the tragicomic misadventures of Victor Crabbe, disappointed schoolmaster and education administrator, tells the story of colonial decline set amongst a primarily domestic panorama of the failed lives and loves of expats, Malayan Moslems, Tamil and Sikh professionals and officials, and Chinese businessmen. As usual with Burgess, the writing is crisp and efficient, although his usual chippy intellectual and cultural peacocking sometimes intrudes, while the story of Malaya's human transition to independent Malaysia is engagingly told, with a rich cast of believably flawed characters, whose fatalistic failures are relieved by comic interludes that are recounted, whatever their superficial unlikeliness, with a sense of ironic reality.
Burgess was a colonial officer in Malaya from 1954 to 1960, and he superbly captures the pervading heat, the looming threat of the ever present jungle Communists, and the importance of food and drink to the British, particularly with regard to gin and beer, the latter the lifesource of the alcoholic police lieutenant, Nabby Adams, in the opening novel. These books are not political, they are rather a human narrative of the quotidian lives of those caught up in the historical process of far eastern decolonialisation, and all the better for that. Those who want to find reinforcement for their post-colonial and postmodern ideological and jejune prejudices should seek succour elsewhere. These three novels are no tally book for accounting the postfacto perceived sins of colonialism, but a depiction of what life was like for those who experienced the fag end of the age of European colonialism and the coming of the more subtly pernicious soft colonialism of anti-communist Americanism.
Burgess was a good but not a great novelist, and the reasons why are clear in this trilogy. His rational, detached, domestic portrait of fading empire among the muddlers and strivers is no match for the considerably richer, broader, and more colourful canvass of Paul Scott in the Raj Quartet, although it might be argued the seediness that Burgess so well depicts is more suitable to his colonial subject than the opera in four acts drama of the wartime travails and precipitate end of British India. Similarly, ethically and politically realistic as he may be, even if his viewpoint must always be that of the Occidental observer, Burgess lacks the moral seriousness, as present in his comic novels as much as the more overtly dramatic, of Graham Greene. Crabbe is no Scobie or Fowler, and these novels are no match for the prescience and the harsh light thrown upon British colonial turpitude, in all its forms, even if the intent is avowedly benign, of a masterpiece like 'The Heart of the Matter' or 'The Quiet American'.
These stories are well made and well told, but are not of the top drawer, and typical of an English novelist who for all his style and wordplay was always to be numbered amongst the Second XI. However, as the author writes in his introduction, it is true that had US planners had the wit to appreciate the reality of later twentieth century colonialism as revealed by Burgess, the naivety and arrogance that led to the tragedy of Vietnam might have been if not avoided - it is beyond the wit of any man to divert the US foreign and security policy establishment from its usual path of destructive stupidly - at least mitigated. Malaya was a warning ignored, a warning not explicit but subtly implied by Burgess' flawed picture of a tired and weak late western colonialism.

Evocative and represents the other side of colonialism very well...

In his introduction to this omnibus, Burgess suggests that it was unfortunate that American readers had not seen these novels when they were first published, that they may have served to give a better impression of what participation in Southeast Asian politics meant in the late 50s and early 60s. While I think these novels are a good tonic against Western pretensions in Asia, there were plenty of other indications for Americans that interference in Vietnam would not end in well-ordered happiness.

Each of the novels is a comic portrait of chaos arising out efforts to control and regulate lives and circumstances, each configuration of characters and events constellated around Englishman Victor Crabbe. Most of the spice and pleasure in the novels, however, lies with the subordinate and peripheral characters, whose circumstances end happily despite their efforts—unlike the decreasingly sorry fate afforded Crabbe.

At the heart of this story of the withering of a segment of the British Empire, there is Victor Crabbe—a former firebrand political thinker, now a teacher and Education Officer—who has exiled himself to Malay, some half dozen years after losing his wife in a fatal driving accident. It is this accident that defines for Crabbe his need to expatiate, even as it largely vitiates him and makes him a poor husband to his second wife, Felena. At the beginning of the third novel, Felena is back in England, and a divorce is imminent. Crabbe’s efforts in each of his postings have largely been ineffectual, and his good intentions are of no use in countering intransigence, English incompetence, local gossip, and a spate of comic mishaps. Crabbe’s presence in Malay is meant to correspond to the larger British presence in Malay, for whose independence in 1957 the British are preparing Malayan subordinates.

In Crabbe’s final official act, he is acting on behalf of the Malay who will replace him, going in-country to a remote plantation. Crabbe meets with the new, bright-faced, enthusiastically robust plantation manager—who wholly subscribes to a feudal paternalism—and discovers that 1) his dead wife was having an affair at the time of her death, 2) that it was with this brash and brawny man, and 3) this man believes Crabbe deliberately let his wife drown. As Crabbe reels from the revelations and accusation, he hobbles away on a foot poisoned by a scorpion, and clumsily falls into the river, trying to traverse the gap between dock and boat. His little-heralded death is meant to serve as another sign of British withdrawal, the motives for his presence and his efforts in the country all muddled. Similarly, in trying to conflate Crabbe’s career in Malay with the fate of his wives/marriages, there is a symbolic muddle, but the Lord Jim-ian devotion to service and good acts does account for at least one of the many, many types of British servant/official in Malay.

The overall scheme in this trilogy is polyphonic, and these novels become a symphony in three movements. Burgess references musical concerns in the character of Robert Loo in the third of the novels in the trilogy (Beds in the East), and suddenly it became clear that my sense of the novels as multi-charactered ensembles was deficient. It’s easy enough to read each of the novels in isolation and come away with the principle theme (that the unruly multitude of races occupying Malay appears incapable of any coherence or homogenization), but when you see that all of the novels develop that same theme you can’t help but view the larger scope and recognize that this theme is enhanced by its variations and the particularities of the characters, their races, and their perspectives.

The novels and the trilogy as a whole are largely comic, but while there are droll and sometimes antic activities and characters, the comedy is of a larger, Chekovian sort—almost Buddhist—where individual striving appears vain and even misguided. Burgess celebrates Malayan diversity—Chinese, Tamil, Indian, Malay, and English peoples; Muslim, Jainist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian religions; and at least five languages—and he suggests that any sort of governance in the country would be little better than herding cats. Because the English have always shied from complete totalitarianism, their presence unified but didn’t wholly control a country that had its own inherent rhythms. Burgess introduces in the final chapters of the trilogy a confident, delusional American presence, one destined to bumble as the English did if they do not alter their expectations about what can and cannot be controlled.

Although I enjoyed the Malayan Trilogy, Burgess's writing suffers by comparison with the novels of Graham Greene, which I have been reading in parallel. Hence the 3 star rating in the teeth of a temptation to award 4.

My reading has also been informed, or perhaps coloured, by my own relatively brief time in Malaysia; I spent a couple of months there about 25 years ago, during an Australo-Asian backpacking frenzy in my late twenties. I found Malaysia utterly delightful, quite unlike its depiction by Burgess - hot, but not overwhelmingly so; cheap without being poverty-stricken; delicious food; everything pleasantly functional in a 5-minutes-late rather than robotically efficient way.

As to the story itself, I think it holds together pretty well, without the sense of contrivance afflicting especially the latter parts of Burgess's other trilogy, the Enderby series. The plotting is believable, and even if some of the characters do stray into the realms of stereotype - lazy, resentful Malays, Chinese spitting and wandering around in their underwear, the British sundered into stupid bigots, hand-wringing bien pensants, male alcoholics, female nymphomaniacs - this tendency isn't so intrusive as to be overwhelming. Overall, Burgess captures exceedingly well the seedy, sweaty, fin de siecle, white-man's-burden character of the eve of independence. Merkeka!

Yet another of my all-time favorite books. Probably the very best evocation of British colonialism in Asia and a very exciting, affecting read. Magnificent prose.

A companion book through my Malaysian travels.

This is the first book written by Anthony Burgess, based on his time spent in Malaysia as a teacher when British colonist appetite was waning and Malaysia was fighting to gather the Independence. Historical background which comes through this novel is very interesting. Malayan Emergency is not discussed but you feel it through the story of communist gorilla warfare on the verge of towns. You feel the British Empire crumbling in the small towns full of different races. Tamils, Malaya, Chinese are represented in force as part of these communities that are trying to work out the life without British administration.

I did not think I would enjoy this that much, after all Malaysian history is not something I would normally pick up as an interest. However, Anthony Burgess can write, and write he does. You can feel the heat, the jungle, personal dramas. It's a well written book. Secondly, modern Malaysia is still a hotpot of cultures and races and travelling through the country it felt like that identity is still work in progress. Fascinating book.

If you liked The Singapore Grip, you'll like this as well.

Before I read Time for a Tiger I thought it's about patriotism or something related to it but it was actually brand of beer. Depictions of ethnic tensions in Malaysia multicultural society need to be seen as

Time for a Tiger

The history book 'Forgotten Armies' got me on the Southeast Asia theme and as Anthony Burgess'
Malayan Triology is mentioned as a mood setter for the post-war era, I continued with it.

Somewhat suspicious from books like 'Clockwork Orange' I was pleasantly surprised,
a great read, the - old couldn't put it down.

A great and hilarious set of characters in book1, particularly British
Nabby Adams the beer-alcoholic Police Lieutenant, huge in stature,
kindly in nature, honest in business, but will do anything to get a drink.

His Malay sidekick Allahad Khan, beleaguered by his ambitious wife, sticks to Nabby's
side as closely as Nabby's scruffy dog Cough, if just to get out of the hellish home,
complete with newborn.

Schoolmaster Victor Crabbe, with wife Fenalla, is the protagonist, but Nabby takes center stage and
guides the story to include the Crabbes. Fenella continually yearns to go back to Mother England to escape the tropical climate and what she sees as strange people. Victor and she are a bit detached, but
she only wants to go where he does.

The story shows the bumbling politics, human nature, and the stuff that
happens in a multi-cultural environment in which everyone is vying
for some type of control or power in the emerging new government
of Malayia that is soon to transition to independence from the British.

The Enemy in the Blanket

Victor gets transferred to a more volatile state where he is now headmaster
at a school that is beset by political problems and a bitter, undermining,
local #2 who thinks he should be running the school. Fenella finally sees
the light, most English women are bored to death by the environment.

A new character, Rupert Hardman, is a very light skinned Englishman who
is trying to start a law practice and because of his finances, is
coerced into marrying a wealthy Malay woman, whose previous husbands
were shot by Communists just before they were to leave the country. They
have a few days of bliss before she drives him crazier and he has to plan
an escape without meeting the fate of the previous hubbies.

Beds in the East

The story concludes with Victor going out into the guerilla infested
boondocks to investigate the murder of a school person by the Commies.
Once there he finds the new estate manager a replacement for the murdered one.
Through their storytelling he discovers that the manager and he had
a connection in their previous lives back in England.

Otherwise this episode is concerned with the promiscuous, egocentric
Rosemary, the beautiful, though black, Malay who is English educated
and will do anything for a marriage to a European. The three Indians
who run throughout the story, are in continual hijinks kind of trouble.

The general attitude of the local gossip is that Islam doesn't comprehend
celibacy and while Victor was having affairs with women before, now he's
reformed and everyone rumors that he's carrying on with a musically gifted
young man who Victor is trying to get recognized, it gets too funny on that angle.

An Indian veterinarian is thought dead. His Indian friend consoles
his mother with this passage:

It is sad, but life has to go on. And, for us Hindus, death is not an
end but a fresh beginning. I do not need to remind you of that, Mrs Smith.
Your son is already reincarnated. We do not know, of course in what form.
It would be pleasant to think that he was now one of the little
animals being treated at this moment in his own dispensary,
though, of course, his assistant will not be treating it very well.

Finally the British leave Malaya, and the Americans start to move in.
Victor loved Malaya and did his best for it, but does anyone there really care or acknowledge his efforts ?

Very absorbing piece of fiction. Didn't want the time-travel to the Malaya of 1940s to come to an end.