The Harmony Silk Factory - SIGNED

Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory comes carrying a signed name, an ex-library past, and the faint air of a book that has already been somewhere, seen things, been filed under a number, and then slipped quietly back into society under its own steam. It concerns Johnny Lim, a man of such variable reputation that pinning him down is like trying to catalogue smoke. Merchant, crook, patriot, tyrant, husband, survivor, local legend: Johnny appears differently depending on who is speaking, which is awkward for anyone hoping for a neat little life story with all the labels facing forward.

The setting is Malaya before and during the Second World War, where the jungle is not merely scenery and the colonial world is already beginning to creak in the joints. Johnny rises through trade, rumour and political murk, eventually becoming the sort of man people talk about in lowered voices, partly because he may be important and partly because he may be dangerous. There is a silk factory, of course, because nothing says harmony quite like business, suspicion, imperial decline and several people quietly disagreeing about the same dead man.

The novel tells Johnny’s story through three different accounts, which is a civilised literary way of saying that nobody can be trusted with the family paperwork. His son has one version, his wife Snow has another, and the Englishman Peter adds a third, each one laying out the past with the serene confidence of someone who has misplaced several crucial pieces. The result is not a portrait so much as a rotating display cabinet, with Johnny looking guilty, romantic, monstrous or misunderstood depending on the angle and lighting.

There is marriage here, but not the sort with bunting. There is empire, but not the sort that looks good once the dust is wiped off. There is war, money, longing, betrayal, memory and the humid little theatre of people trying to become legends before anyone has checked the accounts. Everyone seems to be arranging their version of events as if history were a shop window and the cracked goods could be turned discreetly to the back.

The Harmony Silk Factory is slippery, elegant and faintly poisonous in the best way: a story about how reputations are made, inherited, resented and rearranged after the fact. It understands that families do not preserve history like archivists; they preserve it like smugglers, hiding the inconvenient bits in false bottoms and hoping no one asks why the suitcase is ticking.

This copy is Good, as sold by Crappy Old Books. It is SIGNED, which gives it a little literary swagger, and it is also ex-library, which means it has already endured stamps, shelves, borrowers, systems, labels and the democratic indignity of being touched by the public. A pleasingly conflicted copy, then: authorially blessed, institutionally processed, and now released into the wild with only minor evidence of its previous life in captivity.

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