A lighthearted and mostly entertaining look at the birth of independent Malaya (now Malaysia). The plot, such as it is, is driven by the amalgamation of races and ethnicities in the burgeoning state, as British colonists prepare to leave. But the books are much more about the characters -- who, we are assured in Burgess's intro, have counterparts in real life -- and how they react to their peculiar historical situation. And there are some memorable characters in here. It's also interesting to read while living here in Singapore, a success story in the legacy of the region's racial integration. If these books are anything to go by, it was far rockier up north in Malaya than it was in Singapore.

As for the books themselves, the first one is a solid 3-star, the second one is a boring 2-star, and the third one is a good 4-star (better, probably, coming after the first two). So I averaged out the three.

Provisional thoughts
Always a good comic read, but against a rather bleak landscape in a way. It certainly doesn’t end on a comic note about the project of Empire, that’s what.

The edition
This Vintage paperback has rather shoddy construction and the typography is pretty terrible. The Penguin edition lacked the introduction, but at least the text looked a lot cleaner.

I enjoyed this book firstly because I knew nothing about the British in Malaya. The characters are from very diverse cultures within Malaya, which I found fascinating. There is tension , a bit of humor .

I've avoided posting a review of this for a few days, because I'm having trouble distancing myself from the fact that it's about Malaya (the old name for most of Malaysia), a Malaya I know and love from my parents' stories, and that to my knowledge hasn't been written about this wisely anywhere else. It's not that this trilogy is perfect; like many of my favourite books, it's messy, rambling, and slightly random at times (the third book is probably the weakest of the three -- repetitive and veering too close to caricature). But to my mind the whole thing more than makes up for it. The language is so very rich and sharp, full of obscure but oddly perfect, precise words. At its best, it's as good as Waugh at his best. For the most part, the satire is less slapstick than Waugh, but there's still a good bit of cruel humour. And what I most admire about this is that it's saying things about race and class in Malaya that even now, 50 years later, are rarely being said. This is not the hazy nostalgia of Maugham or the Orientalist stereotyping of Huxley. Where Burgess indulges in stereotypes, you get the feeling he is doing so quite consciously, with a wink at the audience. He's not saying anything Malaysians don't say about each other, and he knows it (for what it's worth, he spent a lot more time there than either of the others).

Though I only just read this, I feel I must have been influenced by it. On the one hand, that makes no sense; on the other hand, I mean, look at the title! Recommended especially for anyone who likes my book. This is where it all came from; this explains the national mess.

This book has been banned in Malaysia, too many uncomfortable observations and some disparaging portrayal of cultural stereotypes. However, much of it is based on real characters and situations. Having grown up in Malaysia, I recognise and understand what Burgess is relating. It seems autobiographical as well and you can't fault the accuracy. Good read.

Set in Malaya during the insurgency, the Malayan Trilogy chronicles the absurdities, conflicts and confusions as seen through the eyes of Victor Crabbe, a well meaning but ineffectual school teacher. With a cast of thousands the 3 novels capture the essence of the death of the British Empire...

Those measly two stars don't mean that I didn't enjoy reading this. I did, rather. It's just that I find that the novel undermines its own intent.

The novel's dislike of racism is apparent, and Burgess skewers it in all its forms: the colonisers' contempt for the colonised and vice versa, the various inter-ethnic hatreds among the Malayans, the overweening love of certain Malayans for their colonisers... This makes for much hilarity.

Burgess said of Malaya that it was “the most remarkable multi-racial society in the world”. And he certainly covers that vibrant mixing of the different ethnic groups with relish. Here he describes the difficulties of grafting an English house system in multi-ethnic Malayan society:

The difficulties of organising a house-system in a school of this kind had been partly solved through weak compromise. At first it had been proposed to call the houses after major prophets – Nabi Adam, Nabi Idris, Nabi Isa, Nabi Mohammed – but everyone except the Muslims protested… The pupils themselves, through their prefects, pressed the advantages of a racial division. The Chinese feared that the Malays would run amok in the dormitories and use knives; the Malays said that they did not like the smell of the Indians; the various Indian races preferred to conduct vendettas only among themselves. Besides, there was the question of food. The Chinese cried out for pork which, to the Muslims, was haram and disgusting; the Hindus would not eat meat at all, despite the persuasions of the British matron; other Indians demanded burning curries and could not stomach the insipid lauk of the Malays.

So, it was all the more disconcerting to find that all the Malayans are represented only by stock caricatures: We have Ibrahim, Crabbe's house boy, an effeminate Malay pondan (the Malay derogatory term for an effeminate homosexual, roughly akin to saying "faggot"); Alladad Khan, a Punjabi Indian Muslim policeman, choleric, adulterous, and lustful; Che' Normah, the oversexed husband killer; Ah Wing, the rat and cat eating Chinese cook… and so on and so on.

One could argue that the English do not come off in a much better light, and there is something to be said for that. This is Burgess on the Headmaster at Crabbe's school:

Boothby yawned with great vigour. He was fond of yawning. He would yawn at dinner-parties, at staff-meetings, at debates, elocution competitions, sports days. He probably yawned in bed with his wife…. "Look here," said Boothby, "I know the facts and you don't. Their clothes were disarranged. It's obvious what was going to happen. You haven't been here as long as I have. These Wogs are hot-blooded. There was a very bad case in Gill's time. Gill himself was nearly thrown out."

Nevertheless, Burgess imbues a certain tragic dignity to his key English characters, whatever their faults: the ineffectual Victor Crabbe and his wife, Fenella; the grasping English lawyer, Rupert Hardman, who marries Che' Normah for her money and then abandons her; and Anne Talbot, the Englishwoman despairingly married to an older man throwing herself at any Englishman who crosses her path. Indeed, the contrast between Anne and her equally promiscuous Indian counterpart, Rosemary Michael, is telling. Anne is a figure who gains a measure of pathos and sympathy as the novel progresses; Rosemary Michael remains forever a bathetic bimbo.

So that's my problem. An equivalent division of characters is that of the lovers and the mechanicals in A Midsummer's Night Dream, only here, the lovers are the English and the rude mechanicals are the Malayans. Regardless of how the humour skewers them all, the English become rounded characters while the Malayans remain only figures of fun. If such a drama were to be shown now with that type of ethic division there would be outraged cries, not wholly unjustified, of racism.

So, there we have it: as much as the novel decries racism, it seems itself unable to achieve sufficient velocity to escape its pull either, and so ultimately falls flat.

Still, that's only my view. Here's a different one from a fellow South-East Asian who liked it much more.

Immensely readable.
Having lived for a while in that part of the world, I recognise many of the attitudes against which this story is based as still existing.

Did not finish it. I’ve lived in Malaysia for a long time, so was excited to see a fictional book set in Malaya that’s written by a famous author.

I started off really enjoying it and had a good time laughing at the comical characters and predicaments…but then it just felt racist, and frankly, boring. I had high hopes for this one, but was disappointed.

I’m not saying it’s a bad book. I just personally could not continue.