Estate £12.99 pp362

This promising first novel by the Malaysian-Chinese author Tash Aw declares that it will do something that sounds both simple and irresistible: tell “The True Story of the Infamous Chinaman Called Johnny”. So says Jasper Lim, who, in the first of this novel’s three parts, sets out to understand everything about his father Johnny — but by the end we know that nothing is simple, for Jasper has been looking in quite the wrong direction. In fact, the main question that this layered narrative answers is not “How wicked was my father?” but “Who was my father?” At the same time, Tash Aw systematically unpicks Jasper’s certainty that “Death erases all traces, all memories of lives that once existed”.

Johnny Lim was, according to the boy he raised, not only a thief, opium smuggler and black marketeer, but also a murderer and “a monster”. Jasper tells us his father is hateful, yet what he shows is rather different. Born in 1920 and living through the contradictions of life during the Japanese takeover of British-administered Malaya in the 1940s, Johnny turns out to be the inarticulate but multiply gifted son of a poor family of southern Chinese immigrants. The reader is soon in sympathy with Johnny’s struggles to survive in a British-run tin mine with racist, incompetent white managers, “No 1 Sir” and the equally obnoxious Nos 2, 3, 4 and 5. Johnny becomes a self-trained genius with machinery, resented and bullied by the incompetent men above him. His swift career-swerve out of mining into salesmanship happens rather close in time to the suspicious death of No 2 Sir. Not long after, Johnny turns into a brilliantly successful salesman at the Tiger Brand Trading Company. Only the kindly owner of the shop, Tiger Tan, is higher than Johnny in the hierarchy — until he, too, dies, without warning. Whenever we see Johnny in close-up, he seems, if anything, gentle and romantic (he is hopelessly, paralysingly in love with Jasper’s beautiful mother, Snow). And yet an unfortunate sequence of deaths dogs his footsteps.

The second, less successful part of the book is narrated by Snow, whose voice never quite becomes believable, in a diary, and the third part by Peter Wormwood, a flamboyant, sexually ambivalent English aesthete who advises Johnny in his long subterranean struggle against Snow’s snobbish parents. Parts two and three both describe, from different viewpoints, a belated honeymoon trip that Snow and Johnny take in the company of Peter Wormwood and Mamoru Kunichika, a suave, mysterious Japanese professor, whom Snow suspects, rightly, to be a military man in disguise. Their sea voyage out to the Seven Maiden Islands is a mistily delineated and occasionally melodramatic affair, where the influence of Joseph Conrad is too strongly felt. The theme of surface appearance belied by deeper reality is so relentlessly explored that it becomes schematic — the apparent homosexual is heterosexual, the macho type cannot function sexually, the resistance hero is a traitor, the man with the most exquisite manners must turn out to be rough, coarse and violent, and so on. At this point, I found myself comparing the novel unfavourably to a much briefer and sharper recent first novel that also centres on a quest for a disreputable father — the Vietnamese author le thi diem thuy’s excellent The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2004).

“Consummatum est”, thinks Peter in old age, in The Harmony Silk Factory’s last sentence. Despite this claim, the crisp promise of the initial narrating voice has not quite been fulfilled. Nevertheless, this book begins with such brio that Tash Aw’s second outing will be eagerly awaited.

Available at the Books First price of £10.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist