The Malayan Trilogy

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The Malayan Trilogy
The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy
Burgessldw1.jpg
First omnibus edition (publ. Penguin, 1972)
Cover art by Peter Bentley

Time for a Tiger
The Enemy in the Blanket
Beds in the East
Author Anthony Burgess
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre Colonial novel
Publisher Heinemann
Published1956 (Time for a Tiger)
1958 (The Enemy in the Blanket)
1959 (Beds in the East)
Media typePrint (paperback)

The Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy in the United States, [1] is a comic 'triptych' of novels by Anthony Burgess set amidst the decolonisation of Malaya.

Contents

It is a detailed fictional exploration of the effects of the Malayan Emergency and of Britain's final withdrawal from its Southeast Asian territories. The American title, decided on by Burgess himself, [2] is taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses : 'The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: | The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep | Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, | 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.' (ll. 55-57) [2] [3]

The three volumes are:

The trilogy tracks the fortunes of the history teacher Victor Crabbe, his professional difficulties, his marriage problems, and his attempt to do his duty in the war against the insurgents.

Time for a Tiger

Time for a Tiger
Burgesstft.jpg
First edition
Author Anthony Burgess
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Series The Long Day Wanes
Genre Colonial novel
Publisher Heinemann
Publication date
1956
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Followed by The Enemy in the Blanket  

Time for a Tiger, the first part of the trilogy, is dedicated, in Jawi script on the first page of the book, "to all my Malayan friends" ("Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu"). It was Burgess's first published work of fiction and appeared in 1956. The title alludes to an advertising slogan for Tiger beer, then, as now, popular in the Malay peninsula. The action centres on the vicissitudes of Victor Crabbe, a history teacher at an elite school for all the peninsula's ethnic groups – Malay Chinese and Indian – the Mansor School, in Kuala Hantu (modelled on the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar, Perak and Raffles Institution, Singapore).

Malay College Kuala Kangsar, on which Mansor School is based. Overfloor and Big Tree, Malay College.jpg
Malay College Kuala Kangsar, on which Mansor School is based.

Victor Crabbe, a resident teacher at the Mansor School, seeks to tackle the threat posed by a boy Communist who appears to be conducting clandestine night-time indoctrination sessions with fellow students. But the headmaster, Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings.

Nabby Adams, an alcoholic police lieutenant who prefers warm beer ("he could not abide it cold"), persuades Crabbe to buy a car, enabling Adams to make a commission as a middleman. This is despite the fact that Crabbe will not drive because of a traumatic car accident in which his first wife died and he was the driver.

Crabbe's marriage to the blonde Fenella is crumbling, while he carries on an affair with a Malay divorcee employed at a nightclub. A junior police officer who works for Adams, Alladad Khan, (who has a secret crush on Fenella) moonlights as a driver for the couple. Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh, a (married) gay cook, works for the couple but is being pursued by the wife he has fled from after being forced to marry her by his family.

The threads of the plot come together when Alladad Khan drives Crabbe, Fenella and Adams to a nearby village, along a route where they face possible ambush by Chinese terrorists. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they return late to the school's speech day and an unexpected chain of events follows that transforms the lives of all the main characters.

The Enemy in the Blanket

The title is a literal translation of the Malay idiom "musuh dalam selimut", which means to be betrayed by an intimate (somewhat similar but not quite the same as the English "sleeping with the enemy"), alluding to the struggles of marriage but also other betrayals in the story. The novel charts the continuing adventures of Victor Crabbe, who becomes headmaster of a school in the imaginary sultanate of Dahaga (meaning thirst in Malay and identifiable with Kelantan) in the years and months leading up to Malayan independence.

Crabbe is made headmaster of a school in Dahaga, in the east coast of Malaya (in an introduction to the trilogy, he identifies the sultanate as Kota Baharu in Kelantan [4] ).

Burgess was dismayed by the design of the cover of the 1958 Heinemann edition of the novel, presumably designed in London. It shows a Sikh working as a ricksha-puller, something unheard of in Malaya or anywhere else. He wrote in his autobiography (Little Wilson and Big God, p. 416): "The design on [the] dust-jacket showed a Sikh pulling a white man and woman in a jinrickshaw. I, who had always looked up to publishers, was discovering that they could be as inept as authors. The reviewers would blame me, not the cover-designer, for that blatant display of ignorance."

Beds in the East

The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra II.vi.49–52: 'The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't.' [5]

Main characters

Bibliography

Editions

Initially published by Heinemann in discrete volumes, all known editions have since included all three novels in one volume. The list below excludes out-of-print editions, notably the paperback editions published by Penguin and Minerva in Britain, and W. W. Norton's hardback edition published in the United States in 1964.

Works of criticism

Film Adaptation

Warner Bros. purchased the film rights to the book trilogy. A live-action feature film based on the first book is in the works.

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References

  1. Brand, Quentin. "Unorientalized". Open Letters Monthly. Archived from the original on 27 September 2018. Retrieved 24 July 2015.
  2. 1 2 Ingersoll, E. G.; Ingersoll, M. C. Conversations with Anthony Burgess. University of Mississippi Press. p. 89.
  3. Tennyson, Alfred (1989). Ricks, Christopher (ed.). Tennyson: A Selected Edition . University of California Press. p.  144.
  4. Burgess, Anthony (2000). "Introduction". The Malayan Trilogy. Vintage. p. ix. ISBN   9780749395926.
  5. Shakespeare, William (1974). "Antony and Cleopatra" . In Evans, G. Blakemore; Kermode, Frank (eds.). The Riverside Shakespeare. Houghton Mifflin. p.  1360. ISBN   0395044022.