Deluded Idyll

By Christopher Porterfield

THE SINGAPORE GRIP

by J.G. Farrell Knopf; 433 pages; $11.95

The colonial garden party has been going on for a long time, and nobody appears to notice how the shadows are lengthening. The Japanese may be massing for a sweep down the Malay Peninsula, but here, in '30s Singapore, it all seems so far away. On these lush lawns the linen suits are crisp, the stengahs are icy, and the Malay and Chinese servants know their place (except for a spot of bother with Communist agitation). Surely that sun couldn't finally be setting on the Empire?

As he showed in The Siege of Krishnpur (1974), British Novelist J.G. Farrell has a pathologist's instinct for the way such a deluded idyll turns into apocalypse.

His doddering British commanders fatally underestimate the Japanese advance. Rubber barons regard war as "only a passing phase in business life." The womenfolk while away blackouts at movies like The Lady from Cheyenne and cavort at the beach as bombs fall across the bay. In the end, Singapore is a hallucinatory panorama of burning buildings, crossed telephone lines and panicky scrambles to get aboard any departing boat. It is a rich and poignant chronicle, and Farrell has researched it down to the last palm-oil statistic. If only he had been content to write history instead of fiction. For the book is not so much imagined as documented. Plot developments, like Singapore rickshas, serve to convey the reader from one exhibit to another. On your right are the rubber industry warehouses, repositories of greed; ahead is Chinatown; up the hill is Tanglin the English colony's surrogate Surrey.

Against these detailed backgrounds, the characters are mere outlines. Walter Blackett, head of Blackett and Webb, the firm whose farflung enterprises frame most of the novel's action, is a buccaneer abroad and a fond family man at home. Yet Blackett is such a compleat capitalist that he is willing to trade his daughter like a commodity in order to pump up the profits. His opposite is young Matthew Webb, a bumbling idealist who despises colonialism but offers no better alternative than a vague new brotherhood of men.

Nor does Farrell's style help much. Like some windy raconteur at the bar of the Raffles Hotel, he is diffuse and banal, occasionally clutching at his listener's elbow with a moralizing aside. His metaphorical flights can plummet ludicrously, as when he compares the cross section of a moment in history to a severed leg of lamb, "where you see the ends of the muscles, nerves, sinews and bone of one piece matching a similar ar rangement in the other." His characters "sink their teeth" into "weighty problems," accept things "lock, stock and barrel," and come to clanging conclusions like: "The old order of things was as dead as a doornail." After an hour or two of this, who could be blamed for edging away from the bar, despite Farrell's undoubted substance and seriousness, and going inside for some dinner? Anything but leg of lamb.

-- Christopher Porterfield

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