The Harmony Silk Factory

by Tash Aw

A brilliant novel from a genuinely exciting new voice in British fiction. A novel for anyone who enjoyed The English Patient. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman -- a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer -- whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley's most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel's narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era. Haunting, highly original, The Harmony Silk Factory is suspenseful to the last page.

• ISBN10: 1440628335
• ISBN13: 9781440628337
• Publish Date: 7 February 2006 (first published 7 March 2005)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Riverhead Books
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 416
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

Memories are things to be buried. They die, just as people do, and with their passing, all traces of the life they once touched are erased, for ever and completely.

Despite my initial misgivings about the book and despite the fact that the book suffered from the pressures of "having to read it" for a book group, The Harmony Silk Factory turned out to be a fairly interesting read.

Mostly set in Malaysia just before the Japanese invasion, Aw created a story that is set on the verges of different things: the demise of colonial rule in Malaya, the fledgling rise of communism, the impending Japanese occupation. Nothing is set. Neither the circumstances of the story, nor the characters.
The story is that of a man, Johnny Lim, yet, none of the story is told by Lim himself. We have three narrators, his son, his wife, his (supposedly) best friend, all of whom give their memory of Johnny Lim, and not one of whom is a reliable narrator.

So, having marvelled at the book all the way through it, I am no longer sure that anything described in the book truly happened. Or at least not in the way, it appears.
For example, there is a drowning that is not a drowning, a father who is not a father, an act of treason, that may not have been one.

What remains, however, is that Johnny Lim's story mostly seems to be a story of betrayal. It's either people themselves who commit this betrayal or it is their memory.
Not bad for a book that I did not think I would enjoy.

Where the book falls down, tho, is in that the abundant descriptions drag on and that it jumps so much between characters and time periods that it is confusing to follow.