Stranded in Singapore
A debut novel that hooks you straight away with its superb portrayal of teen angst.
Originally from Singapore but now based in the UK, Sharlene Teo won a string of awards to help her complete Ponti, her first novel. Set vividly in her humid, polluted, constantly changing homeland, it hooks you in straight away with a superb evocation of female teenage angst.
Sixteen-year-old Szu, trapped in the Whampoa Convent of the Eternally Blessed, is disgusted with her looks: ‘‘I take after my father’s side, apparently, the homely, ashen Ngs.” She blames this bad luck for her lack of appeal to her classmates and teachers: “I wouldn’t be stuck here if I looked even a tiny bit more like my mother, who is a monster but so stunning that she can get away with anything.”
The bleak story of Amisa, Szu’s inexplicably cold, distant mother, is told in the third person and the past tense. It begins in 1968, when she was 10, already intent on escape from her Malay village and her swarming relatives. It stops with her daughter’s birth in 1987 (the year Teo herself was born), after her cherished brother has died and the box-office failure of the three bizarre Ponti movies – in which she incarnated a pontianak, the beautiful but evil female creature that consumes unwary men – has left her stranded in a fraying marriage.
All but one of the present-tense chapters in Szu’s sharp and often funny voice are set in 2003. She is saved by finding a friend, well-off, sharp-tongued Circe, who is oddly drawn to Amisa, hiding in her crumbling bungalow and overgrown garden with a mysterious woman Szu knows as her aunt. When Amisa dies, Circe abandons the devastated Szu.
The third strand, set among the relentlessly spreading skyscrapers of 2020, centres on Circe in her thirties. Divorced and childless, she is floundering in the inanities of PR for B-list celebrities and projects. Asked to dream up a campaign for what will
clearly be a vacuous remake of the Ponti movies, which now have cult status, she feels compelled to resolve her broken friendship with Amisa’s daughter.
Teo writes with unrelenting energy and verve, alternating with poignant sadness. Her Singapore is a jammed-up, jarring mix of old histories, streetscapes, customs and beliefs, and onrushing, shallow-rooted, glitzy modernity, with no easy, happy endings.
Despite occasionally feeling overwritten or overblown, this novel marks her out as a formidable and appealing new talent.
PONTI, by Sharlene Teo (Picador, $35)
Teo writes with unrelenting energy and verve, alternating with poignant sadness.