The Long Day Wanes
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The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Malayan Trilogy, is Anthony Burgess's novel cycle about the withdrawal from empire.
It is a detailed fictional exploration of the effects of the Malayan Emergency and of Britain's final pull-out from its Southeast Asian territories.
The three volumes are:
- Time for a Tiger (1956)
- The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)
- Beds in the East (1959)
With the trilogy, his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate colonial experience of Malaya) to set alongside Orwell's novel on Myanmar (Burmese Days), Forster's on India (A Passage to India) and Greene's on Vietnam (The Quiet American).
As the writer of the trilogy, Burgess was perhaps the last major representative of a tradition of colonial literature going back to Kipling on India and, on Southeast Asia in general, Conrad and Maugham.
It was Burgess's ambition to become "the true fictional expert on Malaya". He wrote in the introduction to an early paperback edition: "My story is about the races of Malaya, as exemplified in characters who have, or had, counterparts in real life."
Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi), Burgess had excellent spoken and written Malay. He put this to good use in learning about the peoples of the peninsula as people rather than as mere servants or remote subjects. He investigated indigenous concerns, and sought to produce a rounded, authentic picture of Southeast Asian life. The corruption of the Southeast Asians and of the Europeans is alike exposed comically but without mercy.
Although the works have few similarities, Burgess paid tribute to Henri Fauconnier, author of the 1930 novel Malaisie (published in English as The Soul of Malaya). He was no doubt thinking of himself as much as of Fauconnier when he wrote: "Perhaps the best of all Malayan fiction is, strangely, by a Frenchman - Malaisie, by Henri Fauconnier, a Prix Goncourt winner of the twenties. Its strength lies in its author's knowledge of the Malays, which naturally entails a knowledge of the Malay language."
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. For plot details, see the pages on the component titles Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East.
[edit] Availability in Malaysia
The trilogy appears to be banned in Malaysia.
The Sun newspaper reported on 5 December 2006 that the country’s internal security ministry was barring books deemed "offensive" to Malaysian society. A number of titles were being denied entry by road at Johor Baru, among them Burgess's Malayan Trilogy.
The secretary of the publications and Quranic texts control division at the ministry, Che Din Yusoh, was reported as saying that the minister enjoyed "absolute discretion" to gazette "undesirable publications", i.e. those banned under the Printing Presses and Publications Act, section 7.
[edit] Opening
| “ | 'East? They wouldn’t know the bloody East if they saw it. Not if you was to hand it to them on a plate would they know it was the East. That’s where the East is, there.' He waved his hand wildly into the black night. 'Out there, west. You wasn’t there, so you wouldn’t know. Now I was. Palestine Police from the end of the war till we packed up. That was the East. You was in India, and that’s not the East any more than this is. So you know nothing about it either. So you needn’t be talking.'
Nabby Adams, supine on the bed, grunted. It was four o'clock in the morning and he did not want to be talking. He had had a confused coloured dream about Bombay, shot with sharp pangs of unpaid bills. Over it all had brooded thirst, thirst for a warmish bottle of Tiger beer. Or Anchor. Or Carlsberg. He said, 'Did you bring any beer back with you?' 'And make up your mind about what bloody race you belong to. One minute it's all about being a farmer's boy in Northamptonshire and the next you're on about the old days in Calcutta and what the British have done to Mother India and the snake-charmers and the bloody temple-bells. Ah, wake up, for God's sake. You're English right enough but you're forgetting how to speak the bloody language, what with traipsing about with Punjabis and Sikhs and God knows what. You talk Hindustani in your sleep, man. Sort it out, for God's sake. If you want to put a loincloth on, get cracking, but don't expect the privileges —' (the word came out in a wet blurr; the needle stuck for a couple of grooves) 'the privileges, the privileges...' |
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