Category Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 2005 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The story of a mysterious man, Johnny Lim. I say mysterious for we get three different narratives relating parts of his life that illustrate very different men, all Johnny, and so it shows us how we bend or interpret the truth. Here we never really discover what that is but in the tales we get a large amount of history of Malaysia. A wonderful, fascinating, beautifully written first novel.
Set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, with the rumbling of the Second World War in the background and the Japanese about to invade, The Harmony Silk Factory is the story of four people: Johnny, an infamous Chinaman – a salesman, a fraudster, possibly a murderer – whose shop house, The Harmony Silk Factory, he uses as a front for his illegal businesses; Snow Soong, the beautiful daughter of one of the Kinta Valley’s most prominent families, who dies giving birth to one of the novel’s narrators; Kunichika, a Japanese officer who loves Snow too; and an Englishman, Peter Wormwood, who went to Malaysia like many English but never came back, who also loved Snow to the end of his life. A journey the four of them take into the jungle has a devastating effect on all of them, and brilliantly exposes the cultural tensions of the era.
