My take: The story of the Japanese occupation and the Malayan Emergency in Malaya is written to an exhaustive extent by a number of Asian authors so much so that I approached this book with a sense of dread, wondering what else is there to write or read about those terrible times in the 1940s.
To my chagrin, The Garden of Evening Mists is such a poetically elegant piece of work - cleverly written and -thought-out - that I read it with wide-eyed interest and fascination. Tan's so-beautiful prose sets off both visual and emotive reactions at every turn of the page, in his understated descriptions of nature and its surroundings, scenes and of his characters.
One gets the sense of a paradox here; on the one hand, the book exudes calmness and serenity in the harmony of a created garden and on the other, the backdrop of continuing war and healing in the aftermath of unimaginable brutality persists. Of the two scenarios, the former reigns supreme. There is something to learn from the book and I derived great enjoyment from the book and if that does not constitute a good book, I don't know what does.
Tan Twan Eng is an author to watch out for, now, and in the future. I highly recommend his works.
My favourite line from the book: I found the viewing tower half hidden in trees, like the crow's nest of a galleon that had foundered among the branches, trapped by a tide of leaves. (Chapter One, page 18)
Paperback: Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she would journey to see him.
A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals.
Despite her hatred of the Japanese, she asks the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, to create a memorial garden for her sister who died in the camp.
He refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice 'until the monsoon' so that she can design a garden herself.
As Yun Ling begins working in the Garden of Evening Mists, another war is raging in the hills and jungles beyond.
The Malayan Emergency is entering its darkest days; communist guerillas are murdering planters, miners and their families, seeking to take over the country by any means, while the Malayan nationalists are fighting for independence from centuries of British colonial rule.
But who is Nakamura Aritomo, and how did he come to be exiled from his homeland?
And is Yun Ling's survival of the Japanese camp somehow connected to Aritomo and the Garden of Evening Mists?
About the author: Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia. He worked as an intellectual property lawyer in Kuala Lumpur before becoming a full-time writer. His debut novel, The Gift of Rain, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated.
The Garden of Evening Mists (2012) is his second novel and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012 and won the Man Asian Literary Prize. He divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town.
Do visit Tan Twan Eng's website for more news and updates.
The author tells us what the story is about:
Tan Twan Eng reads the first two paragraphs from his book:
Rating: 5/5
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