Michael Powell – Blood and Porridge

October 31, 2024October 31, 2024

Malaysian macabre 2: The Muse and Other Stories by Chua Kok Yee

© Penguin Books

More Halloween-inspired stuff…

The Muse and Other Stories is the second collection of Malaysian horror tales I’ve read recently. The other was My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim, which I reviewed on this blog a few posts ago.

The Muse… is the work of Chua Kok Yee. Like Tunku Halim, he seems to have led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence – turning into a horror writer after sunset and penning stories of gruesome terror, but during the sunlit hours doing the sort of respectable, wholesome job that your parents would boast about you doing at dinner parties with friends. In Halim’s case, he combined horror writing with being a legal expert who practised corporate and conveyancing law. In Chua’s case (if I’ve located the correct person on social media), the non-horror world knows him as an accountant and ‘Adjunct Professor at University Putra Malaysia’, with ‘a history of working in the food and beverage and consumer goods industry’. Which shows you should never judge by appearances.

There are eight stories in The Muse… It starts strongly with the title tale, a cynical take on the idea that there are beautiful (inevitably female) muses whose only function is to channel inspiration towards great (inevitably male) artists. In reality, this has often been a case of women who were talented artists in their own right having their work ignored and being used, abused and eventually abandoned by those supposedly drawing inspiration from them. See, for example, Camille Claude, muse to Augustin Rodin, an artist herself, who ended up spending 30 years in an asylum; or Dora Maar, muse to Pablo Picasso, a photographer, who ended up needing psychiatric treatment and afterwards took solace in religion.

In Chua’s story, an up-and-coming novelist, and married man, called Mark Lee Wing Sen has an adulterous relationship with a younger woman called Leanne, which seemingly causes a new fervour and intensity in his writing: “…Leanne’s voice kept echoing in my head. The characters, plot and structure of the story flowed into my mind as if it was demanding to be told… I was almost like a new person after Leanne and I started our affair. Throughout the years, she inspired me more than anyone or anything else in the world… Her fingerprints are all over my books. She was my muse; a flowing river of inspiration that provided sustenance to this storytelling.” However, their relationship turns sour and worse, leading to causing obsession, murder and madness. And it doesn’t stop there. The ‘river of inspiration’ continues to flow into Mark from Leanne, but the writing she induces in him now is deadly in nature.

Rather brilliantly, the story’s two heroes – Mark’s agent Arun and a physician called Dr Leong whom he summons when he discovers Mark in shockingly poor health – cite the works of Stephen King when they realise they’re up against a supernatural foe and find themselves speculating on matters of good and evil. In particular, they discuss Father Callahan, the weak-willed priest in Salem’s Lot (1975), who’s unable to stand up to the chief vampire despite being armed with a cross. This is because his faith isn’t strong enough, which renders the cross useless: “At that moment, the cross lost its power and the vampire won.”

© New English Library

Elsewhere, two stories have scenarios where a pair of characters who knew each other as children meet up years later – and with their unexpected reunions come unsettling twists. In Remember, it’s a boy, Ah Hong, who’s suddenly contacted by his long-lost sister, Yee Ching. In Under the Mask, a young girl called Anna encounters a young man called Jiang whom she recalls was an orphan from a charitable institution sent to live in her household for a time. The institution had a programme whereby its orphans were temporarily given ‘a chance to be part of a natural home.’ Remember’s twist is slightly predictable, but the one in Under the Mask is shocking and upsetting.

Several stories showcase Chua’s sense of humour. Sword of Angel amusingly combines a gritty Malaysian crime drama with a fantasy story in the manner of the classic Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger movie A Matter of Life and Death. Admittedly, this is a pretty warped variation on A Matter of Life and Death. An incompetent gangster gets himself killed whilst on his way to rub out an informer, but then is raised from the dead by a mysterious shapeshifting angel known simply as ‘Mike’. The angel wants him to carry out a different assassination – that of a seemingly innocuous kid called Calvin, who needs to be terminated because “the angel in charge of his Fortune Scale screwed up” and made him supernaturally and harmfully lucky: “He’s not merely ‘lucky’. He is an abomination! You know, luck is not infinite. It comes from a pool, and every time this Calvin drinks from it, someone else is deprived of their rightful share. And I’m telling you, he is guzzling it down. I have to put a stop to it.”

The gangster is less than happy to find himself back in the world of the living in a zombie-like state, bearing the scars of a recent autopsy: “…my body was festooned with stitches. They looked like huge, black centipedes on my arms and thighs. The worst was the huge Y-shaped incision that ran down my torso.” Later, he’s also displeased to learn that he’s not the only dead gangster Mike has reanimated in order to take out Calvin. The story is enjoyable largely because of its hapless and grumbling protagonist and it’s gratifying when he finally figures out a way to turn the tables on the devious Mike.

Similarly, Duke of Zhi has supernatural forces making an intervention in the world of the living and compelling an unfortunate mortal to do their bidding. The reason this time is more mundane. The denizens of hell, led by the narrator’s deceased mother, are concerned about the Loh family, who ‘run the Chinese funeral paraphernalia shop called Loh Paper Enterprise’ and are ‘the best funeral paraphernalia shop in Kuala Lumpur.’ The highlights of their ‘funeral paraphernalia’ are their lavishly detailed paper mansions that, according to Chinese custom, are burnt at funerals in the belief they’ll be passed on to the deceased in the afterlife, where those dead souls can live inside them in comfort.

The narrator gets a glimpse of the paper mansion he purchased from the Lohs for his mother, which now accommodates her in hell: “I was inside a huge hall, filled with exquisite-looking furniture. The chairs were carved from wood, painted in gold and decorated with intricate carvings… A crystal chandelier hung majestically high above, while every inch of the walls was adorned with abstract motifs of animals. Yes, it was the most elegant room I had ever been in…. ‘Hey! I know this place!’ I exclaimed, and jumped to my feet.”

It transpires that the young man set to inherit the Loh family’s business, despite having ‘talent that could rival his grandfather,’ isn’t interested in taking it on. “He doesn’t know his importance to us here in the afterlife, because he’s a non-believer… Despite his gift, he prefers to run a hipster coffee shop instead… Millions of souls would be forced to stay in substandard mansions…” The bewildered narrator is tasked with convincing Loh Junior to abandon the coffee shop, keep the family business going, and keep providing the spirits of the dead with opulent housing. It’s a task that, predictably, he bungles.

Duke of Zhi is amusing with its depiction, in these Trumpian times, of an afterlife whose inhabitants of are just as obsessed with real estate as living souls are. It also touches on a rather sad fact in the real world, which is the art of the “traditional Chinese paper house crafters… is quickly dying as an increasing number of people seek alternative ways to honour their deceased relatives.”

I also like the story because it features the demon Horse-Face, one of the guardians of hell in Chinese mythology. You can see a human-sized effigy of him at Har Par Villa, the most fascinating museum in Singapore. There, he stands at the entrance of the Villa’s most famous (or infamous) attraction, a graphic representation of the Ten Courts of Hell. I wanted to write something about Har Par Villa on this blog during the run-up to Halloween 2024, but couldn’t find the time. I will soon, though.

Also touching on local folklore are the stories Akuan, which draws on legends of the harimau akuan, that is, ‘were-tiger, were-leopard or were-panther’, and Feed the Boy, which features a toyol. A toyol, the latter story’s protagonist hears from a mysterious antiques dealer, is “the soul of an unborn baby possessed by a djinn. By nature, a djinn is wild and fiery. It’s the baby’s soul that tempers its more dangerous side, turning it tame and obedient. The soul will be weakened if it’s not fed by the blood of its master. When that happens, the wild nature of the djinn would take over.” But fed by blood, and kept ‘tame and obedient’, a toyal scuttles off to commit crimes on its master’s behalf. It uses its diminutive size to enter other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their valuables.

This suits the protagonist of Feed the Boy, Edry, a hard-up food-delivery man “feeling envious of old school friends who were driving new Japanese cars, while he could only afford a motorcycle. He felt like a loser whenever he delivered food to beautiful houses and condominiums, because their bathrooms alone were more spacious than his rented room.” Edry’s fortunes take an upswing when he acquires a toyol – which disconcertingly has a name, Aamir. He grows rich thanks to Aamir’s ‘nightly heists’ and feeding it with his blood, which it extracts from his toes, seems a small price to pay.

He becomes less keen on the creature when, a few years later, he gets married and his wife becomes pregnant. It’s then that he learns how “sometimes a toyol can become excited by the presence of another child in the household.” What follows, chronicling Edry’s attempts – inevitably doomed attempts, because this is a horror story – to get rid of Aamer, makes this for me the best tale in the book.

With its mixture of the up-to-date and the traditional, and the gruesome and the funny, and with its references to both Malaysian and Western culture, I found The Muse and Other Stories a solidly entertaining read. So, I recommend you to purchase a copy of it and enjoy the products of Chua Kok Yee’s fertile imagination.

Alternatively, of course, you could send your tame toyol crawling into your nearest bookshop, library or Amazon book-warehouse after business hours and procure a copy that way…

From linkedin.com

June 7, 2021June 9, 2021

Patrick’s progress

© John Murray

I’ve just finished reading a biography of one of the 20^th century’s greatest travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor. The biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, was penned by Artemis Cooper, who’d known him since her childhood, and was published in 2012, a year after his death.

My problem with biographies is that invariably the subjects are, or were, famous and successful. Although I find the story of their fortunes interesting while they’re on the way up, and having to overcome hardships and obstacles, those stories become less compelling when the subjects have achieved success and settled onto a plateau of comfort, wealth and well-being. With Fermor, at least, that secure but less interesting plateau is delayed because his success didn’t really come until when he was middle-aged. And the first 200 pages of this biography, more than half of it, are devoted to Fermor’s youth. Happily, these pages contain the two most dramatic events of his life: the epic trek he embarked on in 1933, at the age of 18, from the Dutch coast to Istanbul; and, while a Special Operations Executive officer during World War II, his heading of a mission in 1944 to kidnap Major General Heinrich Kreipe, commander of German forces on Nazi-occupied Crete.

Furthermore, the number of books Fermor had published in his lifetime barely reached double figures. He also continued to travel. This means that the latter part of Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, while more sedate, is still interesting because it isn’t just about the boring business of writing.

Cooper is clearly a fan. She admits to once having a ‘schoolgirl crush’ on Fermor and writes early on: “Radiating a joyful enthusiasm, he was one of those people who made you feel more alive the moment he came into the room, and eager to join in whatever he was planning to do…”

However, she quickly acknowledges one of the controversies about Fermor, that he wasn’t adverse to embroidering reality with fantasy in his supposedly factual writing. Sometimes, this was unintentional because he was trying to remember events from decades earlier, but sometimes it happened because, well, the fantasy made for a better yarn. Indeed, Cooper introduces the issue with examples from the early years of Fermor’s life when he was being looked after by a family called the Martins in Northamptonshire, while his real family were in India. The setting was not as bucolic as Fermor liked to recall: “Mr Martin, whom he was later to remember as a farmer, in fact worked at the Ordnance Depot as an engineer and served in the local fire brigade.”

Also, Weedon Bec, the Martins’ village in Northamptonshire, provided Fermor with a startlingly gruesome anecdote that he recounted in his book, A Time of Gifts (1977). At a community bonfire celebrating the end of World War I, “…one of the boys had been dancing around with a firework in his mouth. It had slipped down his throat, and he had died ‘spitting stars’.” However, Cooper notes: “There is no reference to this tragedy in the Northamptonshire Chronicle, nor is it mentioned in the Weedon Deanery Parish Magazine which described the celebrations in considerable detail.”

Similar question marks appear during Fermor’s accounts of his journey to Istanbul in his teens, which are recorded in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water (1986) and the posthumously published (and edited by Cooper and Colin Thubron) The Broken Road (2013). I’d known that the material about him crossing the Great Hungarian Plain on horseback in Between the Woods and the Water was suspect – the horse was a fanciful addition to events. However, I wasn’t aware that a memorable scene in The Broken Road was questionable too. According to Fermor in 2003: “Slogging on south, I lost my way after dark, fell into the sea, and waded soaked into a glimmering cave full of shepherds and fishermen – Bulgars and Greeks – for a strange night of dancing and song. It was like a flickering firelit scene out of Salvator Rosa.” Cooper suggests that this incident was really a conflation of two incidents, one of which happened at a later time on Mount Athos. As for the period described in The Broken Road, Cooper states: “At no point in his original account did he walk down this stretch of coast alone, nor did he lose his footing and find himself floundering among freezing rock-pools after dark.”

Unambiguous, though, is the bravery and audacity shown by Fermor and his comrades in wartime Crete. It reflects well on Fermor that he valued the role played by the island’s tenacious resistance fighters in the operation to abduct General Kreipe from under the nose of the German forces he commanded. Indeed, their high-ranking captive was astonished when he found out what was going on. “For Kreipe,” writes Cooper, “being on the other side of the occupation was an eye-opener. He had no idea that the Cretans and the British were working so closely together.”

Accordingly, Fermor wasn’t pleased at how the operation was portrayed on celluloid, in the 1957 Michael Powell / Emeric Pressburger movie Ill–Met by Moonlight, in which he was played by Dirk Bogarde. Writing to another of the operation’s British participants, Billy Moss, Fermor said of the film: “You and I are perfectly OK, we emerge as charming, intrepid chaps. It’s really the Cretans I’m worried about…” The film’s depiction of the Cretans upset him because it relegated them “to the role of picturesque and slightly absurd foreigners constantly in a state of agitation, coolly managed by these two unruffled and underacting sahibs.”

Thereafter, with Fermor finding his vocation – a slow, gradual progress, because he was anything but a disciplined writer – the book inevitably becomes less eventful. However, there are still some intriguing moments. A trip to the Caribbean brings him into the orbit of James Bond creator Ian Fleming, ensconced in his Goldeneye Estate in Jamaica. I’ve heard speculation that the dashing war-hero Fermor inspired the character of Bond, but at this point Fleming was already “bashing away at a thriller”, the first Bond novel Casino Royale (1953), so Fermor couldn’t have been the original inspiration. However, Fermor’s writings about voodoo, something he became immersed in whilst on the island of Haiti, informed Fleming’s depiction of it in the second Bond novel, Live and Let Die (1954).

Then we get an account of Fermor’s involvement with the 1958 John Huston movie The Roots of Heaven, for which he was commissioned to rewrite Romain Gary’s original screenplay and had to attend several weeks of filming in Chad, Cameroon and the Central African Republic. The film, about “a maverick loner, Morel, who is determined to stop the slaughter of elephants by big game hunters and ivory poachers,” brought Fermor into contact with Trevor Howard, who “drank nothing but whisky from morning till night,” and Errol Flynn, of whom he wrote in a letter, “Errol and I have become great buddies… He is a tremendous shit, but a very funny one…” In a predictable instance of Hollywood hypocrisy, Cooper notes: “Despite the fact that The Roots of Heaven was a plea to save the elephants, John Huston was very keen to shoot one… The back of his Land Rover was an arsenal of shotguns, rifles and ammunition, and it was obvious that he lived not for the film, but to slope off into the bush with a gun.”

We also hear about Fermor participating in 1972 in a Greek TV programme reuniting the surviving members of the 1944 Kreipe operation. The last participant to come onstage, “to gasps of surprise and a round of applause from the audience,” was the focus of the whole operation, General Kreipe himself. When Fermor asked him in German if he held any grudges about what’d happened, the general gamely replied, “If I had any bad feelings… I wouldn’t be here, would I?”

And we get some short but melancholic accounts of him revisiting eastern Europe during, and just after, Communism. During these visits he tried, often fruitlessly, to track down people and places he’d known during his wanderings through the region in the 1930s. He found one, formerly aristocratic acquaintance in an old folks’ home in Budapest, physically broken and wits wandering. This sad exchange ensues: “‘My old friend Patrick Leigh Fermor lives in Greece.’ – ‘Yes, Elemér, it’s me, it’s Paddy!’ – ‘No, no, you are much too young… But if you go to Greece tell him I’m here, I hope he remembers me.’

Fermor belonged to an era when travelling (for pleasure) and, indeed, writing were largely seen as activities for the upper classes. Thus, certain of his traits can be annoying, traits emblematic of being raised in that privileged stratum of English society: his boundless self-confidence, his shamelessness at making use of the contacts he’s accrued, the fact that he has all those contacts in the first place. This struck me especially when I read Between the Woods and the Water, which sees him stay with a succession of posh eastern European aristocrats and enjoy lavish hospitality that, at times, he seems to think is his entitlement.

Cooper is at least aware of these potential criticisms. Regarding what happens in Between the Woods, she points out: “For his hosts, there was nothing unusual in having guests stay for days or even weeks at a time.” Also: “The greatest blessing that a guest can bring is the right kind of curiosity, and it bubbled out of Paddy like a natural spring…”, which must have been gratifying for his hosts, who by then probably felt like “a useless fragment of a broken empire.” It’s worth mentioning too that Fermor never received a university education which, if it had happened, would presumably have put him among the elite in Oxford or Cambridge Universities and set the seal on him as an establishment figure. Perhaps the fact that the system never fully processed him, and didn’t condition him entirely about what an English gentleman was and wasn’t meant to do, explains why he retained the ‘common touch’ throughout his life. He seemed as much at home blethering with a Macedonian shepherd as he was with a Romanian Count.

If Fermor appears blessed with more than his fair share of luck, it’s probably more to do with Joan Raynor, who became his long-term companion and finally his wife. The daughter of someone who was, successively, a Conservative MP, a First Lord of the Admiralty and a Viscount, she received a private income that enabled Fermor to continue with his travel writing even when he wasn’t reaping great financial rewards from it. She was also broadminded about their relationship, which at times could be described as an ‘open’ one, allowing Fermor to indulge in a few dalliances on the side.

Eventually, the Fermors built a handsome villa for themselves in a rustic part of Greece. As I approached the biography’s last chapters, I wondered how they’d reacted to the country’s growing tourist industry in the late 20^th century. Wouldn’t they have been disgruntled at how travellers of a different pedigree from them, folk from less well-off backgrounds intent on getting a week’s break in the sun rather than on experiencing the glories of Greek culture and history, were swamping the beauty spots of their adopted home? But the changes caused by mass-tourism seemed not to impinge on their idyll. Neither did they object to their Greek neighbours making some money out of it. In fact, the building of a hotel nearby seems to have come as a relief to them. Their villa was frequently crowded with guests and now they could farm some of them out to the new establishment.

It must have been tempting to portray Fermor simply as an unstoppable force of nature / Renaissance man-of-action. To her credit, Cooper admits that while he had many admirers, he didn’t charm everyone. Turning up in Athens in 1935, he soon got an invitation from the son of the British ambassador to stay at the embassy. But the ambassador himself proved “quite immune, if not allergic, to Paddy’s high spirits and exotic conversation”, growled at him, “You seem bloody pleased with yourself, don’t you?” and soon gave him his marching orders. Nor was a post-war stint at the British Council in Athens a great success. As one colleague observed, “There was a very insensitive side to Paddy… He was very bumptious, a bit of a know-all, and his enthusiasm and noisiness could be rather wearing.”

While Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure is certainly no warts-and-all exposé, it doesn’t get entirely swept away by the awe-inspiring, larger-than-life aura that Fermor projected. You’re left with the impression of someone who, yes, was remarkable but who, like all of us, sported a few imperfections too. Which actually makes you like him more as a result.

Taken by Joan Leigh Fermor