The Night Tiger
by Yangsze Choo (Quercus, $35) Reviewed by Steve Walker
According to the Chinese sage, Confucius, there are five virtues in life; charity towards others, honesty, knowledge, integrity and order or politeness. Even in our technological modernity, these still hold true. Trouble begins when they conflict with Western values.
New York Times best-selling author, Yangsze Choo, explores this conflict through her murder mystery set in Malaya in the 1930s. Under British colonial rule, Malaya is still gripped by strong superstitions. They are at their strongest when death is concerned.
Ren, an orphaned house boy to a dying British doctor, is given a mission by his master. He must find a lost finger and bury it with the doctor within 49 days, or his master’s soul will never be at rest. Ren is also the name of the first Confucian virtue, benevolence.
Meanwhile, a young girl, Ji Lin, works in a dance hall, trying to help her mother repay debt. In this dance hall, she stumbles on a finger in a glass vial, in the pocket of a customer. Mysteriously, this customer dies shortly afterwards. It is the first of several deaths, all of which seem to have some sinister link.
It is Ren who suffers the most from the
deaths. He sees himself as cursed, fearing the revenge of a ‘‘weretiger’’, who will eat the humans it kills.
Choo’s plot essentially interweaves the fates of these two central characters as they strive to find each other and comply with the dead doctor’s last request. A mounting body count is just one of the obstacles in their way.
Choo’s main achievement is her creation of a credible and detailed environment where ancient superstitions can live with
modern medicine and policing. She is particularly successful at establishing this ‘‘looking glass world governed by unsettling rules’’. In some respects, the novel resembles aspects of the Man Booker prize-winning Lincoln in the Bardo. It is a world where the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living, influencing outcomes and shaping destinies.
Choo is also highly effective in building interesting characters. It is not just Ren and Ji Lin who elicit sympathy but also others, like the dissolute doctor William Acton, Ren’s new master, and his manipulative fiance´ e, Lydia, and Ji Lin’s step-brother, Shin. Her relationship with Shin provides an unexpected twist in the novel.
Where Choo is less successful is her overreliance on coincidence. There are moments that stretch credibility too far, and detract from this exploration of a world riven by cultural tensions. Likewise, occasionally the interweaving of plot strands can be predictable or irritating, seeming like a ploy to stop the reader knowing too much.
To a Western reader, the novel offers an insight into two very different worlds: one an overlay of British colonial rule on an Eastern society, and the other an ancient culture in which values are sometimes at odds with modern life. It is surprising how modern these virtues are.