The Gift of Rain (2007)

Philip Hutton is "a child born between two worlds, belonging to neither" as a half-white, half-Chinese boy raised by his wealthy father, when his mother dies in his infancy. He has three siblings, all white, whom he cannot feel close to, even though they sometimes try to get close to him. In 1939, when he's 16, he chooses to stay behind in Penang, Malaysia while the rest of the family spends months in England. One day he meets the Japanese man, who is renting their island. Endo-san soon offers to teach Philip the ancient art of aikijutsu, and thus begins a friendship which is to have far reaching consequences for them and many others.

I was immersed in this book which taught me so much about the Buddhist Wheel of Life and its never-ending connection and about the Japanese conception of duty, honor, and friendship. This book is filled with wonderful characters who have fascinating stories to be told. Recommended. ( )

Finally got around to reading this one, which been on my shelves for a while...and now I will be clearing it off the shelves. I felt lukewarm about it when I started, then began to like it more, but less than halfway through began to dislike it, starting with the dialogue, which seemed unrealistic and occasionally stilted. Explanations of the culture were also a little belabored, often more show than tell. For example, the explanation about the importance of "face" (i.e. saving face) was simply unnecessary telling, and should have been clear from the characters' interactions. I found that something kept the main character, Philip Hutton, from being sympathetic. When young, he seems to have an understanding of the world inconsistent with his age; when older, his choices aren't fully understandable. Overall, I became skeptical toward the end of the book and only finished it because I was so far along. Being generous with three stars...though I could see how someone else would like it. Relatively few WWII-era historical novels are set in Asia/the Pacific, so that was different.


"It frightened me, that a person could be made to bear such a burden, for what if...these burdens were carried from one lifetime into another - how could one endure the accumulation of grief?" p. 229-230 ( )

When I realized that this book was set in South East Asia I had to plunge into it. SE Asia is one of my favorite areas in the world. Whenever it is mentioned, memories from my visits and from having lived there are immediately summoned back in my mind.

Memories of books, which I hold responsible for first igniting my imagination and fascination with the place, inevitably also spring back. The most memorable are Lord Jim and Somerset Maugham’s Casuarina Tree and Other Stories but perhaps the latter holds more evocative power.



When I first read it prior to my first visit I was fascinated by Maugham’s description of the silhouette of the casuarina tree with its leaves forming a delicate lace against the sun.



Before Google times I had to wait until I was there, and could find the actual tree, to be able to appreciate Maugham’s image. Looking around I finally found my first Casuarina tree next to the entrance to the Sarawak Museum. I took a picture and I keep it as a book marker in my copy of the book.

This introduction is to make you aware of the anticipation with which I began to read this work. And now, with all this agitated expectation, what was my opinion of The Gift of Rain?

Well, let’s see.

The book is very ambitious in its complex setting, scope and lush writing. As a first book by the young writer Tan Twan Eng, it has been well received. It made it into the long list for the Booker Prize in 2007. It also set its author in the right path, since his second and latest novel, [b:The Garden of Evening Mists|12031532|The Garden of Evening Mists |Tan Twan Eng|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1333033941s/12031532.jpg|16997854], was short listed for this same prize this year.

The novel presents the tragic demise of a British family, which had established itself in the Penang island in the colony of Malaysia, and where it created an economic emporium. In a flash back manner, the youngest son and main character. Philip Arminius Khoo–Hutton tells us, at some point in the 1990’s, the fate of his family during WWII and the Japanese occupation of the Malaysian peninsula.

Philip Hutton is the youngest of the four Hutton children, but he is the only son of a second marriage when his widowed father Noel Hutton married a Chinese Lady. As the fruit of a mixed marriage, Philip is conscious of being the product of two cultures. But as he befriends a Japanese man who becomes his very much admired teacher of Aikido or sensei, he comes to represent not two but three cultures. He stands at the Malaysian crux with its three occupants: the Chinese settlers, the British settlers, and the Japanese invaders. Curiously, Malays do not seem to figure much in the book.

Philip Hutton’s tripartite nature and inner conflicts become the forces that move the plot. The story will unfold as Philip moves from one culture or community to another, each time being both welcome and rejected, and either chooses or is led to play different roles. So, choice or fate?. In this impassionate novel Mr. Tan strives to show us the collusion of two different understandings of fate, the Asian concept of circularity and the lineal understanding held by Western thought. What a goal for a first book!

Apart from the exotic setting, the plot and the deeper musings, this book is also very pleasant to read because of its language. Mr. Tan has a very delicate and sweetly evocative pen and some of his descriptions are beautiful and lyrical and call for a slow reading.

But The Gift of Rain suffers a bit from its being a first book. Although written by an Asian author, it does taste of Western audiences. Some parts read somewhat like a Baedecker or a Vademecum of Asia. So, we get a somewhat irritating explanation of what the Nyonya community is, or a somewhat irrelevant brief digest of the occupation of the Forbidden City (with an acknowledged fictional episode included).

As he has set himself to write about a period in which he was not yet born, Mr. Tan’s youth is also felt in the way he has resorted to research. One feels it is not experience talking. So, for example, he only mentions the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but keeps silent on the almost simultaneous attack of the Clark Base in the Philippines, where the US kept its Air Force Post. The latter would have been more shocking to someone living in the area at the time, but the Pearl Harbor bombing is more prominent in our current consciousness.

May be that is the trend that current fiction is following. We readers may be becoming lazy and we expect to be led by the hand and have everything explained to us.

And last but not least, I found that not just before but also while reading this book, one could breathe the air of Western writers. Conrad is a ghost not just for me but also probably for Mr. Tan. And given what I have said about Maugham’s Casuarina, one could imagine how I jolted when I saw that this tree also figures prominently in The Gift of Rain. By planting a specimen in the Hutton gardens and making the tree the symbol of the Hutton family, Tan Twan Eng is also paying a direct homage to Somerset Maugham.

I could not object to this, but Maugham could evoke the exotic with less explicit exegesis.

This leaves me with clarifying my rating. I think that because of its neophyte tint this is a three star book, but since the components are my pet subjects and as Mr Tan is clearly a promising author, the fourth star is awarded

And to extend a bit of the Baedecker color to my review as well, here is the beautiful house of Cheong Fatt Tze, La Maison Bleu (sic) that is often mentioned as a way of guiding us to the place and times.

( )

With so many people enthusiastically recommending Tan Twan Eng's more recent Booker-shortlisted The Garden of Evening Mists, I was happy when my book group suggested reading this, his first novel, for our January meeting.

Although this is contemporary fiction with a real and beautifully realised geographical location - the island of Penang, Malaysia - and with the action either contemporary or set within recent real historical events (just before and during the Japanese invasion of the island in WWII) there were actually some unexpected similarities with the fantasy book which I read just before this, Tolkien's early, dark tale 'The Children of Hurin'. Both involve issues of friendship and betrayal, with main protagonists who become highly skilled warriors and swordsmen, who have intense and conflicted relationships with friends and family, who struggle to escape from what seems to be set down as their fate, and in the process make choices with good intentions but often disastrous results.

The warrior element of this story comes from martial art of aikido, and the relationship which is explored most fully in the book is that between the main character, Philip (half English half Chinese son of one of the successful business families of Penang) who aged 16 meets Endo-san, a Japanese man staying on an island on his father's estate; Endo-san soon becomes his aikido master. The effects of the physical, mental and spiritual training Philip undergoes seem at first to be very beneficial for his general well-being and his other relationships as Philip begins to grow up and mature - but then theatre of WWII spreads to their part of the world, the British flee, the Japanese invade and Philip - who partly because of his mixed racical heritage had always felt himself to be something of an outsider - suddenly finds himself with very divided loyalties and with very difficult decisions to make - the consequences of which he is still struggling with 50 or 60 years later in the framing narrative.

The writing is beautiful, the descriptions of the island, its architecture and communities, the natural landscape and the sea, are all very vivid; also vividly realised as the story progresses are the violence and horror of war and occupation as it affected this particular place. With fortune tellers messages being taken seriously by some characters, and hints of re-incarnation with patterns of relationship being repeated from former lives, there are mysterious elements within this story which some in our book group found hard to accept or understand. I don't think the reader needs to share these beliefs however, or needs to have any understanding or knowledge of the martial arts to appreciate the story; these are part of the melting pot of ideas and ways of life which Philip himself struggled make sense of from his mixed cultural and spiritual heritage.

If only for a vivid introduction to a part of the world and a time in history which were unfamiliar to me and which I was glad to read about, I would recommend this book - but the story is also gripping (and increasingly disturbing) and the moral dilemmas about loyalties in wartime are thought-provoking. I'm looking forward to reading 'Garden of Evening Mists' soon. ( )

This is a book that practically begs for being made into a major silver screen tearjerker with a star-studded cast and an original soundtrack by Hans Zimmer. If that's your thing, then great - go get the book and read your heart out. Personally, however, I was very much underwhelmed pretty much on every account and aspect, but perhaps this was a question of too high expectations. ( )