The Enemy in the Blanket
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| Author | Anthony Burgess |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Long Day Wanes |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Heinemann, Penguin |
| Released | 1958 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Preceded by | Time for a Tiger |
| Followed by | Beds in the East |
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) is the second novel in Anthony Burgess's Malayan Trilogy The Long Day Wanes.
The idiom in the title signifies "traitor" while also alluding to the struggles of marriage.
The novel charts the continuing adventures of Victor Crabbe, who becomes headmaster of a school in the imaginary sultanate of Dahanga in the years and months leading up to Malayan independence.
[edit] Characters
- Victor Crabbe
- Fenella, Crabbe's wife
- Abdul Kadir, Crabbe's hard-drinking and foul-mouthed teaching colleague at the school, whose every sentence includes the words "For fuck's sake!"
- The hard-up lawyer Rupert Hardman, who converts to Islam in order to wed a domineering Muslim woman, 'Che Normah, for her money. He later bitterly regrets it and tries to return to the West in order to escape the marriage. (The inclusion of the Hardman character sparked a libel suit that halted sales of the novel, but the suit was eventually thrown out by a Singapore court.)
- Talbot, the State Education Officer, a fat-buttocked gourmand whom Victor Crabbe cuckolds
- Anne Talbot, Talbot's wife, a wanton adulteress
- The womanising Abang of Dahanga, who is also a devotee of chess and who aims both to seduce Crabbe's wife and purloin his car
- Father Laforgue, a priest who has spent most of his life in China and longs to return there but is prevented from doing so, having been banished by the Communist regime that came to power in Beijing a decade earlier
- Ah Wing, Crabbe's elderly Chinese cook who, it emerges, has been supplying the insurgents with provisions
- Jaganathan, a fellow teacher who plots to supplant and ruin Crabbe
- Mohinder Singh, a shopkeeper trying desperately, and failing, to compete with Chinese traders
[edit] Trivia
Burgess was dismayed by the design of the cover of the 1958 Heinemann edition of the novel (pictured above), 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."
[edit] Extracts
| “ | ...an Empire now crashing about their ears. The Sikh smiled at the vanity of human aspirations.
Her face was that of a boy gang-leader, smooth with the innocence of one who, by the same quirk as blinds a man to the mystery of whistling or riding a bicycle, has never mastered the art of affection or compassion or properly learned the moral dichotomy. She gave the lie to the European superstition - chiefly a missionary superstition - that the women of the East are downtrodden. ...with Indians there is an unhealthy love of the law... ...he became one with his Chinese parishioners, announcing a trade as honest as that of the dentist, the seller of rice-wine, the brothel-keeper, the purveyor of quack rejuvenators and aphrodisiacs, or the vendor of shark’s-fin strips. …the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold… ‘...You know what they call you expatriates? White leeches.’ He forgot that the Malays revere cats and that the Chinese merely relish them. Later they would...pant in venery. …Talbot…fat-boy-buttocked. In China he had spoken good Mandarin, and in ten years this had become his first tongue. Here he found himself with a parish of Hokkien and Cantonese speakers and a few English people whose language he could hardly talk. His French, severed from its sources of nourishment, grown coarse through lack of use, halted and wavered, searching for the right word which Mandarin was always ready to supply. And he was so sick for China that he wondered whether anything mattered now except his returning there. France meant nothing to him. Europeans had sometimes invited him to dinner and given him stuffed aubergines and onion soup and Nuits St Georges and what they said was good coffee.…They had evinced, in their curious French mixed with Malay (both were foreign languages, both occupied the same compartment, they were bound to get mixed), a nostalgia for France which amused him slightly, bored him much, flattered him not at all. He would milk the white man....The white man had more money than sense. …the whole world here breathed easy concupiscence… My dear Hardman, It was pleasant... I am sorry that your Oriental venture has not been going as well as you expected. But, then, I think that the days when a man could expect to make his fortune in the East are dead and gone. Indeed, the time seems to have come for the reverse of the old process to apply, and for the East to dominate the West. …a striped sarong and a pyjama jacket, the best of both worlds. …English translation of the Koran. I wonder how, with such a repetitive farrago of platitudes, expressing so self-evident a theology and an ethic so puerile, Islam can have spread as it has. I decide that the East has definitely spoiled me for women. |
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