The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

Book Overview

A sweetly satiric look at the twilight days of colonialism.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393309436
• ISBN13: 9780393309430
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 514 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

A funny book that requires a modicum of maturity

I started this book in my 20's. It did not do very much for me then. I liked the exotic location and indeed the characters who peopled it. I hasten to add that I had just finished the Enderby Trilogy and that is a hard act to follow, and I was expecting similar.Some 20 years after, I have revisited the book. What you get are the sites, sounds, smells, ambience, attitude (loved the bit about the young Malaysians adopting 50's rock and roll attitude)and the entire human continent of Asia unfolding in one locality - sikhs, tamils, chinese, arabs, mestizos etc. You can feel the heat and humidity and anxiety.This is book is cinema for the imagination. I just hope that the film rights have been sold to right people.

Life in colonial Malaya

This trilogy is composed of books published over a 3 year period [1956-59], and are called Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and The Beds in the East. The Trilogy was re-issued later as The Long Day Wanes in 1981.The central character is Victor Crabbe, an idealist liberal working first as a teacher, then as a headmaster, and finally in the Administration of the Education department in Malaya [now Malaysia]. Anthony Burgess (John Burgess Wilson) denied that Crabbe was based on himself, but there are some obvious similarities in the careers and in Burgess's own attitudes to his compatriots. In the first book, Time for a Tiger, Crabbe has profound difficulties with his wife, Fenella, who like many expatriate wives in that time had a problem in coming to grips with life in a petty-minded and prejudiced environment. This is the last few years before Malaysia was granted independence, and so there is no more empire-building, only commercial exploitation. This theme is repeated throughout the 3 books. Crabbe has a permanent guilt about the death of his first wife in a car accident, for which he may or may not have been responsible, and this theme also recurs throughout the trilogy. She leaves him at the end of "The Enemy in the Blanket" and so in the third book he is alone and struggling with internal politics in running his department - his overall concern is to do a good job and to leave the education department in good hands for the future, when the country attains its independence.I think this book wil appeal more to people with a knowledge of life in colonial Malaysia. Crabbe has several irritating characteristics, and the references to music, and classical literature may irritate some readers unfamiliar with these subjects. Burgess was a frustrated composer, and this is evident in the writings of the Trilogy. Words in the major National languages, Malay, Tamil, and Cantonese are used quite freely throughout the text, and a glossary is provided; however the Malay is in the old spelling and not the modernised Bahasa Malaysia. Sometimes the plot and sub-plots seem weak and wander away from a logical conclusion. The theme of the book isof course somewhat dated, and the prose style does not have the charm and interest of say, Somerset Maugham, who was writing about a much earlier era in colonial history.I like this book for personal reasons, I have travelled frequently and widely in Malaysia for over 30 years, and have family there. It is interesting to compare events from the time when the book was set, and now, and be thankful for the positive changes.

The Sun Sets on the British Empire

Anthony Burgess' brilliant satire and mastery of linguistics become apparent and used at their best in this trilogy about the final days of British imperialism.Burgess' use of social satire contextually set in the lives of a few warped individuals (as he did in Honey for the Bears, A Clockwork Orange, the Enderby tales and others)returns in this edgy but brilliant and amussing trilogy relating the end of Bristish imperialism on the Asian continent.He runs with themes such as the predjudice of the white Europeans, and the reverse predjudice of the people that they had formally ruled over. These stories talk about a civil servent working as a teacher and trying to make a change in the lives of people who are already changing their own world as they give the boot the their one time British task masters. The teacher turned administrator, Victor Crabbe, tries desperately to keep control of his own eroding life as he sees the rotting of the systems created by the British many years before. His own fall is much like the one that the British empire took, and like the workers in the empire: he tries to help and reform things after it is too late for him to cause any positive effect.Crabbe wants to unite the different Asian ethnic groups that are taking control of Malaya (Malaysia now), but the only thing that they can agree upon is their hatred for the white man and also their hatred of each other.This tale is edgy and gritty but at the same time, Burgess' wonderful wit and humor come shining through. Tragic and sad one minute, and absurdly funny the next, the one thing that "The Long Day Wanes" always has is brilliance and insight into the human condition.A delightful and moving trilogy, "The Long Day Wanes" runs with Burgess' style in that he constantly plays with dialect and word games. The comedy of language and the way that people communicate (or fail to do so) is a constant theme in Anthony Burgess' work, and this trilogy makes sure to keep that alive and well; even if it is only a small facet of this masterpiece.

The 'best' novel ever on Malaya (sorry, Malaysia)

Burgess has achieved something remarkable in this trilogy in penetrating the mentality of the Chinese, Indian, Malays, Eurasians and British colonialists who inhabited the pre-independence Malaya of the 1950's. He cleverly dissects his vast repertoire of characters, from the lowest Tamil night watchman, Malay driver or Chinese towkay, to the highest Malay prince or most gin-soddened British official, in the most unpatronising way with bucket loads of humour and insight. Being British and having lived in Malaysia and Singapore for the past eleven years, I can deeply identify with the (alas, now imaginary) world of these three closely interlinked novels. It's a colourful cosmos which has sadly been erased forever by the forces of globalisation (that is to say, 'Americanisation'). In a sense, the erosion of the traditional ways and the coming of change and modernisation (not necessarily for the better) is one of the themes of the trilogy and a preface to the modern life of Southeast Asia, a place more of computers, stock markets and western style conspicuous consumption than a place of shady kedai, gin stengahs on cool verandahs or mysterious Wayang Kulit shows. As a postscript to the Malayan trilogy, you should also refer to the second volume of Burgess's autobiography in which he relates a visit, many years later, to this much-changed locale and is accosted in the northern Malaysian town of Ipoh by a young Chinese girl selling him not her body, but a western brand of evangelical Christianity.

A must-read for ex-pats and students of Asian affairs

This ranks as one of the funniest books ever written, while being at the same time a social history of Malaysia, or Malaya as it was known under British Rule. The first book of the trilogy deals with the last days of British colonialism (hence the title "The Long Day Wanes") through the misadventures of a remittance man named Nabby Adams, a civil servant, his wife, household staff, and local government characters. The second novel follows the civil servant and his failing marriage through the guerilla years in the struggling nation, and the third is The Coming of the Americans. These three events have been a sort of template for late 20th century global affairs. It's a tight trilogy that reflects historical and social changes through its characters in the satirical literary slapstick characteristic of Burgess at his best. If you've never read Burgess, this is the place to start. It will bring you an appreciation of "where he's coming from," literally: it is based upon his experiences as a British Civil Servant in the waning days of the Empire (upon which the sun sets this 30 June with the cession of Hong Kong to Red China)