The Malayan Trilogy

The Malayan Trilogy
The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy

1993 W.W. Norton edition
Author Anthony Burgess
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre Colonial novel
Publisher Heinemann
Published 1956 (Time for a Tiger)
1958 (The Enemy in the Blanket)
1959 (Beds in the East)
Media type Print (paperback)

The Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy in the United States,[1] is a comic 'triptych' of novels by Anthony Burgess on the decolonisation of Malaya.

It is a detailed fictional exploration of the effects of the Malayan Emergency and of Britain's final pull-out from its Southeast Asian territories. The American title, decided on by Burgess himself,[2] is taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses: 'The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: | The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep | Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, | 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.' (ll. 55-57)[2][3]

The three volumes are:

The trilogy tracks the fortunes of the history teacher Victor Crabbe, his professional difficulties, his marriage problems, and his attempt to do his duty in the war against the insurgents. For plot details, see the pages on the component titles Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East.

Plot

Time for a Tiger

Malay College Kuala Kangsar, on which Mansor School is based.

Victor Crabbe, a resident teacher at the Mansor School, seeks to tackle the threat posed by a boy Communist who appears to be conducting clandestine night-time indoctrination sessions with fellow students. But the headmaster, Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings.

Nabby Adams, an alcoholic police lieutenant who prefers warm beer ("he could not abide it cold"), persuades Crabbe to buy a car, enabling Adams to make a commission as a middleman. This is despite the fact that Crabbe will not drive because of a traumatic car accident in which his first wife died and he was the driver.

Crabbe's marriage to the blonde Fenella is crumbling, while he carries on an affair with a Malay divorcee employed at a nightclub. A junior police officer who works for Adams, Alladad Khan, (who has a secret crush on Fenella) moonlights as a driver for the couple. Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh, a (married) gay cook, works for the couple but is being pursued by the wife he has fled from after being forced to marry her by his family.

The threads of the plot come together when Alladad Khan drives Crabbe, Fenella and Adams to a nearby village, along a route where they face possible ambush by Chinese terrorists. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they return late to the school's speech day and an unexpected chain of events follows that transforms the lives of all the main characters.

The Enemy in the Blanket

Crabbe is made headmaster of a school in Dahaga, in the east coast of Malaya (in an introduction to the trilogy, he identifies the sultanate as Kota Baharu in Kelantan[4]).

Characters

Beds in the East

The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra II.vi.49-52: 'The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't.'[5]

Characters

Bibliography

Editions

Works of criticism

References

  1. Brand, Quentin. "Unorientalized". Open Letters Monthly.
  2. 1 2 Ingersoll, E. G.; Ingersoll, M. C. Conversations with Anthony Burgess. University of Mississippi Press. p. 89.
  3. Tennyson, Alfred (1989). Ricks, Christopher, ed. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. University of California Press. p. 144.
  4. Burgess, Anthony (2000). "Introduction". The Malayan Trilogy. Vintage. p. ix. ISBN 9780749395926.
  5. Shakespeare, William (1974). "Antony and Cleopatra". In Evans, G. Blakemore; Kermode, Frank. The Riverside Shakespeare. Houghton Mifflin. p. 1360. ISBN 0395044022.
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