This is an ambitious novel set in Malaysia with a multilayered plot moving back and forth in three time periods, from the late 80s when the story is told in the first person by retiring judge Teoh Yun Ling, to the time in WWII when Japan occupied Malaya and she and her sister were held in an internment camp somewhere in the jungle surrounding Cameron Highlands. Yun Ling was the only survivor of that camp and a decade after her ordeal she returns to Cameron Highlands to meet Nakamura Aritomo, a Japanese gardener, who had worked for the Emperor but who had retired to Malaya just before the war under unexplained circumstances, to ask him to design a commemorative garden for her sister. Aritomo refuses but he accepts her as his apprentice for one year so that she could build the garden herself. This is only the starting point of the fascinating plot of this novel, which includes many subplots and characters. In the meantime we learn about the Emergency established in Malaya in the 50s to combat the communist insurgency; the tea plantation owned by Ling’s neighbor, a Boer-war veteran from South Africa; the interaction among the various racial communities in the region; the life story of an art historian who visits Yun Ling because he’s writing a book on Aritomo; the art of Japanese gardening as well as ancient woodblock printing and tatooing. But in essence the novel is about the selective workings of memory (the narrator is suffering from aphasia and she’s worried she’ll lose her ability to remember the events of her past) and the human conflicts confronting the atrocities committed during the war with the healing powers of art and Zen values. Tan weaves all these stories deftly into a complex narrative structure (non unlike the design of a Japanese garden, where much is based on deception) which makes for a challenging reading experience. But he gives us a lot to chew from, perhaps too much so and, ultimately, I experienced some frustration along the way. It didn’t help that Tan’s writing style was not on a par with the story and the structure. As beautiful as some of the imagery and metaphors were, I felt that Tan wasted some of his skills padding things up instead of making the characters less one-dimensional. I also found the dialogue a bit artificial and flat. With the above qualms, I’d still recommend reading this very entertaining book. This is Tan’s second novel and it was short-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize.
