Abstract
Noel Barber’s Tanamera plots the story of Singapore during World War II as an adventure and interracial romance. Published in 1981, Tanamera enjoyed immense popularity along with other colonial romances that circulated at the time. This article explores readers’ continuing fascination with the genre of colonial romance. Read in light of the postcolonial theory, the study turns to the way the reading public outside academia responds to the colonial imaginary and the extent to which it shapes the collective memory of the empire. The article focuses on Tanamera as a case study for its representations of history and memory of colonialism.
What made life so exciting was not only Julie, innocent conspiracy, work, play, but the fact that I felt an integral part of Singapore, part of the city in which every street I explored seemed to lead to the sea, to ships shimmering on the fiery horizon, to a glimpse of passenger liners in the outer roads surrounded by a flurry of sampans, or battered rusting freighters that might have figured in stories by Conrad or Maugham, for the Singapore of my youth was still the Singapore of Somerset Maugham. (Barber, 1981: 62)
Noel Barber’s Tanamera presents the story of Singapore under the shadow of the Second World War plotted as an adventure and interracial romance during the times of tremendous geopolitical conflict. Published in 1981, Tanamera enjoyed immense popularity in the final decades of the twentieth century. The novel, along with several similar ones like M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, and Valerie Fitzgerald‘s Zemindar, 1 had its heyday in the these decades of the twentieth century. Characterized by their focus on the central English protagonist and his or her relationships, romantic entanglements, adventures, and escapades amid fears of racial miscegenation, and all this set against the backdrop of far-flung British colonies — these novels have been termed colonial romances, where history, romance, and colonialism have meshed together inextricably.
The television adaptations of these books led Salman Rushdie (1984) to comment on the narratives as “raj revivals” of the 1980s. Raj revival, according to Rushdie, was an attempt to create a revisionist narrative of colonialism “in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East”, (1984: n.p.) this time with nostalgia as its centrepiece. Rushdie and several other scholars pointed out the problematic aspect of such colonial romances, where the plot and narrative buttress colonialism’s ideologies and elide its deeply exploitative nature. Apart from Rushdie, scholars like Jenny Sharpe and Hsu Ming Teo have studied the manifestations of the British Empire in the nostalgic mode in the historical fiction written in the late 1970s and 1980s. Thus, nearly two or three decades after most of the British colonies gained independence, “the raj revival reanimates the great narrative of the civilizing mission” (Sharpe, 1993: 143). Rushdie’s harsh denunciation locates the strains of colonial nostalgia directly in the socio-political attitudes of then-contemporary Britain: “The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourage many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence” (Rushdie, 1984: n.p.). Turning specifically to the trope of romance, Teo (2004) points out the fixation on the middle class, on upward social mobility, and on alleged individual effort in the latter half of the twentieth century, whereby the colonies offered the perfect setting for such masculine imperial exploits.
Since fiction not only enables remembering but also outlines the way the past is remembered, this quarrel between nostalgia and the realities of colonialism is also a quarrel for the space and narratives of collective memory. The colonial narratives cast as a tale tales of adventure and romance reflect an attempt to shape and sustain the colonial imaginary of the Empire in retrospect. Though the peak of the colonial romances was short-lived, nearly four decades later, the books continue to be widely read. On Goodreads, a database of books, annotations, and reviews, Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, set in colonial India, had garnered an average rating of 4.21 out of 5 with 1,211 reviews by November 2019. Nearly 80 percent of the readers’ reviews on Amazon give the book a five-star rating. Barber’s Tanamera has been rated 4.14 on Goodreads with 1,040 reader reviews. Given that Goodreads was launched in 2006, these reviews come nearly three decades after its publication. Some dated as late as 2019 indicate the continuing popularity of the novel.
This study examines the genre of colonial romance — the narratives and the memories it disseminates — and the reader’s fascination with the genre. Given the sway of postcolonial theory over the field of literary studies, this study examines the way a reading public outside academia responds to the construction and persistence of colonial imaginaries, and the extent to which such narratives continue to shape the collective memory of the empire. The study, therefore, examines the extent to which postcolonial discourses have shaped (or failed to shape) the perceptions of the reading public concerning the memories of colonialism and nostalgia for the empire.
The article focuses on Noel Barber’s Tanamera, a novel about the Fall of Singapore, as a case study of the genre, in terms of its representations of history as well as its stakes in collective memory. Though there are other books like J. G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip, which is a scathing indictment on British policy in Singapore and often makes it to the list of recommended postcolonial novels set in Singapore, the case of Tanamera is particularly interesting given the genre of romance where colonial ideologies are endorsed by the narrative. Its ongoing popularity, despite its unabashedly colonial stance, makes it a case worthy of deeper attention. The study analyses how, in Tanamera, the historical event which the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described as “the worst disaster, and largest capitulation, in British history” (Churchill, 1978/1950: 81) is transformed into a memory of adventure, heroism, and nostalgia. It further goes on to examine the collective memory of the event as it is narrated by the text and imbibed by readers who claim to have “learned about Singapore” by reading Tanamera, as they acknowledge in the reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and LibraryThing.
History and romance: History as romance
Tanamera is set in and charts the story of the British community in Malaya and Singapore, from the period immediately before the Second World War to its aftermath. Despite their faith in the defense forces and the Fortress of Singapore, the British surrendered to the Japanese forces in December 1941. This was followed by nearly four years of hardship as Singapore and Malaya suffered under the Japanese occupation, until another turn in the fortunes of the Allied forces brought the British back into power in Malaya. 2
Reconstruction became the focus of the years that followed the war. The task was not just the reconstruction of Singapore and Malaya, but more importantly of the image of the British Empire, which had suffered a violent setback during the war. Thus began the attempt to refashion the image of Britain and British heroes as victims as well as saviours (Blackburn and Hack, 2012: 53). This was especially critical given the waves of anticolonial and nationalist fervour spreading through the British colonies. While Kevin Blackburn and Karl Hack focus on war memorials and monuments that were constructed in Singapore in the decade following the war, they also mention memoirs, poetry, and literature as crucial to the reconstruction narrative of the British Empire (2012: 84).
Casting the history of the fall and recovery of Singapore as a romance fulfils this purpose. According to Northrop Frye, “the romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfillment dream, and for that reason, it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age, the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendency” (2006: 186). Like the hero of an adventure romance, the hero of British colonial romance was portrayed as “superior in degree to other men and to his environment […] whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being” (Frye, 2006: 33–34; emphasis added). Discussing the emplotment of history into the generic convention of a narrative, Hayden White cites “romance as the narrative form to be used to make sense out of the historical process conceived as a struggle of essential virtue against a virulent, but ultimately transitory, vice” (1987: 150). Describing the “drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience”, White points out the romantic rendition of history as a triumphal progression of events in such a mode (1987: 8).
Thus romance, as a genre, has a complex political history. The tradition of the hero’s quest, which lies at the heart of a romance, has been explored as a narrative of coming-of-age masculinity by scholars like Joseph Campbell. However, the quest, in a colonial set-up, transforms into a tale of conquest wherein tropes of colonial men — hardworking, enterprising, and fearless — are pressed into the service of the empire (Windholz, 1999; Malhotra, 2016). In Tanamera, such forms of masculinity are celebrated in the figures of the Dexter men — from Grandpa Jack to his son, and eventually his grandson, John Dexter. Simultaneous depictions of colonial subjects as exotic and alluring, and also primitive and threatening express the anxieties as well as the fantasies of the Western reading public about the orient (McClintock, 1995; Chrisman, 2000; Davis, 2013).
The focus on interpersonal dramas in the domestic and private sphere is another staple of the romance genre wherein the social, political, and cultural concerns are explored within a private realm. In a colonial romance, the colony is not only a backdrop to the tale of adventure; it is integral to the plot and romance is deployed as a means to explore inter-racial interactions, the boundaries of colonial society, and the spaces for transgression and subversion. Thus, the narrative mounts a critique of the colonial enterprise, and at the same time, decries the emergence of postcolonial nationalism (Davis, 2013). The inter-racial romanc that lies at the heart of the narrative foregrounds the racial boundaries under the guise of a liberal attitude. Instead of resisting colonial discourse, the romance between the colonizer and the colonized subject offers a fantasy that conceals skewed racial, economic, and gender relations. The imagined nation, where the colonizer and colonized can come together in the idea of a single family is negated by the fear of miscegenation that preoccupied colonial discourse. For example in Malaya, Eurasians were viewed with fascination and disdain by both Europeans and Asians. In the light of European theories of race, Eurasian “mixed race” was seen as a degeneration of the “pure” European race, and embodied evidence of a racial transgression (Lee, 2004: 4). Eurasian women like Julie in Tanamera present the most problematic subjects of such orientalist fantasy, part emancipated and European, and part dusky and exotic — attractive and contemptible at the same time. On the other hand, among the colonized, a Eurasian person was an image of betrayal of lineage, a physical embodiment of treachery to the family line and name. This focus on lineage maintained the emphasis on blood and purity, as well as the gendered undertones, by resorting to the patriarchal discourse of family name and honour. Vicky Lee suggests that Chinese terms used to describe Eurasians illustrate this disdain: “tsap chung (half-caste), da luen chung, tsap ba lang (mixed/ messed up breed)” (2004: 18). Eurasians were thus perceived as subverting the “purity” of both groups. Thus, Emily Davis insists that “if romance proved well suited to the xenophobic nationalism of the colonial project, it was taken up with equal enthusiasm as a vehicle for postcolonial nation-building” (2013: 64). The inter-racial family romance in the colonial setting traces these problematic genealogies of racialism.
Tanamera by Noel Barber
Barber’s novel is a story of adventure and inter-racial romance set against a highly racialized colonial society in Singapore. The protagonist John Dexter is the scion of the Dexter enterprise set up by his grandfather Jack Dexter — “a product of his time […] a Yorkshire man from Hull who had landed in Singapore” and carved his business literally out of the jungles of Malaya, often through suspicious business dealings. Built by clearing the forests of Singapore, and through the wealth created by establishing monopoly over the tin trade by ousting local rivals, Tanamera, as the great mansion of the Dexters is christened, literally means “red earth”. It is to be a “home for generations to come”, as Grandpa Jack announces: “These are typical of the men who will inherit the goodness of this island […] we must never forget that we need each other. Singapore was their island, but Britain has made it what it is” (Barber, 1981: 34). Thus Tanamera is a staple symbol of the settler saga, a representation of the “hardships encountered by pioneer families clearing the land to establish and run agricultural enterprises whether they were farms or plantations where they introduced modern capitalist methods into primitive and empty areas…” (Lorcin, 2013: 104–105).
By the time John emerges as an heir, the Dexters are a family to be reckoned with in Singaporean society. Portrayed as a confident young man, with shrewd business sense and great popularity with women, John navigates his way through Singapore and England. He falls in love with Julie Soong, the daughter of their wealthy Chinese neighbour. The affair violates the Singapore “colour bar”, and the lovers are separated by the parents until they are united by the war. Along the way, John also impregnates and gets married to his brother’s fiancée, whom he later divorces to marry Julie. In the course of the story, he joins the guerilla forces, forms friendships with Chinese, Japanese, and Malays, which make him the true heir to Singapore’s colonial society. Unlike Paul Soong, Julie’s brother, whose father associates work with the lowering of family dignity, John adds to the fortunes of the Dexters’ trading business. Moreover, unlike Micki, his Japanese friend, whose business dealings are notably dubious, the Dexters’ shady business deals are justified in terms of profit both to the company and the colony. These highly stylized descriptions accentuate the distance between the colonizers and colonized, authenticating the British spirit of enterprise over all others.
Hence the plot of the “star-crossed” lovers and their romance is enmeshed with the narrative of colonialism. The subtext of racism simmers close to the surface. Julie, who is half Chinese and half American is described in exoticist terms typical of the orientalist portrayal of the native: “despite the long, glossy black hair and the pale gold skin she looked in a curious way like her mama. You could see that she wasn’t a white girl, but I thought she was beautiful. She had a slow smile, and her dark eyes seemed to tease you” (Barber, 1981: 47). Later, John observes “how well she compared with the healthy pink European girls who never sweated, only perspired. It wasn’t only her generous mouth — always it seemed in those days laughing — her eyes laughed too, gave her a vaguely naughty look as though she would be prepared to search for excitement whatever the cost — if the chance ever came in her strict Chinese household” (Barber, 1981: 54). Such hypersexualized images of a colonized metisse woman — with her teasing smile, “naughty” eyes, and “generous” mouth — underscores a femininity that is attractive and at the same time transgressive. Ann Stoler insists on reading metissage as “a powerful trope for internal contamination and for challenges to rule that were morally, politically, and sexually conceived” (2002: 80). Women like Julie embody a sexual affront to the idea of purity that linked race, sexuality, and colonialism inextricably. Appropriation of her sexuality, through her affair with John and later by her work as a nurse that presses her independence into the service of the Allied forces, renders her as an ideal colonialized subject who fits unquestioningly into her gendered and racialized role.
John’s fascination with Julie echoes his fascination with Singapore, which appears attractive and repulsive at the same time:
there was money for all who had the marrow of adventure in their bones, together with the health to withstand the onslaughts of a tropical climate of hot sun and lashing rain, the lack of sanitation in a country ravaged by malaria, fever, smallpox, a city where the pockmarked streets along which the white men bumped and clattered in their carriages to work were often flanked with gutters in which the stench of nightsoil (as it was politely called) was enough to make you vomit as it flowed to the Singapore River and thence to the sea. (Barber, 1981: 16)
Like John Dexter, in an interview during the publication of the book, Barber discussed how his fascination with Singapore led him to success: “It is quite extraordinary, really, Singapore changed my life. It is where I really grew up and it helped me make my name later on. I hit jackpot with Sinister Twilight. The place got under my skin” (Barber, qtd. in Mahabubani, 1980: 9). In his study of colonial imaginations, Edward Said describes the notion of “imaginative geographies” to refer to the way meaning is ascribed to physical spaces and how the knowledge produced through such “meaningful” representations dictates the attitudes and actions oriented towards these very spaces (1978: 71). Thus the conquest and control of colonies involved a large scale mobilization of a series of discursive practices through which the physical space of the colonies was justifiably claimed. The story of the Dexter family highlights the way colonizers frequently appropriated, disciplined, idealized, and eroticized Singapore as a colonial space. As they tame the tropical jungles, clear the land for plantations, and oust local competitors, Dexter men conduct affairs with the local women. The women, including Julie Soong, are exoticized and eroticized in a manner similar to the physical space of Singapore and Malaya.
Like Grandpa Jack in the novel, Barber too is a product of his time, a journalist whose most productive years as a writer coincided with Thatcher’s call for a return to the Victorian values to justify Britain’s political and international policies in the 1980s which were highly dependent on the reformulation of history. In Sinister Twilight, Barber (1968) insists that “‘White’ Singapore was above all a beautiful city” (12). Despite the postwar crisis precipitated by the Communist insurgency, Barber in The War of Running Dogs (1972) writes that “1948 Malaya […] had achieved a rare distinction: it was a contented paradise in which men of many skins and creeds lived in harmony, enjoying the highest standard of living as the country moved quietly but firmly — and without any strife — to the day when it would be granted independence from the British” (1972: 12). Such nostalgia formed an integral part of Thatcher’s Britain in the 1980s.
3
The picture of colonial paradise ignores, among much else, the racial divide in Malaya as well as the dangers of the war. Writing at the time when England was answering political challenges at home and abroad by validating its colonial past, Barber’s representations of history are imbued with a similar conservative nostalgia. In Sinister Twilight, the end of British rule in Singapore is narrated in terms of collective mourning:
As the day’s work ends, as the heat begins to wane, Singaporeans still foregather on the broad balcony of the Cricket Club facing the padang for an evening stengah. Here, with the sea on the one side and a line of flame trees on the other, one is certain to stumble into an old friend as one watches Asians and Europeans happily playing tennis or football together in this club where once only ‘whites’ were allowed […] The awe, the mystique surrounding the tuan bazar had gone forever. (Barber, 1968: 341–342; emphasis in original)
Such nostalgia replaces the violence and exploitation of colonialism with a narrative of loss and longing. Patricia Lorcin links colonial nostalgia with the loss of the colonial lifestyle: “colonial nostalgia is connected to reminiscences and evocations of a past lifestyle and an idealized vision of the intercultural relations within the colony that existed at that time” (2013: 103). John’s infatuations, as well as his inter-racial friendships and his contribution to the liberation of Singapore from the Japanese, project images of benevolent cooperation and colonial bonhomie. Such an embroidered memory of a sociable colonial life echoes Svetlana Boym’s idea of restorative nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia constructs the master narratives of belonging and non-belonging, of a single, seemingly coherent plot of history, through a “core of national and religious revivals” that signify “a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment” (Boym, 2001: 49). In a colonial romance like Tanamera, the turbulence of the present is overcome by the visions of past stability, unity, and continuity. In her study of historical romance, Helen Hughes cites the expression “English heritage”: “an evocative title, suggesting a peculiar national virtue handed down to us through countless generations […] that evokes a mixture of nostalgia and pride which has been used often enough in the past to help create a sense of national identity” (2014/1993: 65). Imbued with this nostalgia, colonial romance turns to the setting of the erstwhile colonies to tell the stories of British heroes and their quests that overlapped with the enterprise of colonial capitalism. Tanamera and other colonial romances of the 1980s present an attempt to reconfigure the national character and identity of Britain by mapping it onto the colonial victories of the past.
Reader reviews on the internet: Degradation of taste or democratization of reading
While the above discussion situates the text and its ideologies within the ambit of postcolonial critique, this study aims to understand its wide-scale popularity despite the questionable ideologies inherent in the narrative. This article now turns to readers’ comments and recommendations on websites like Amazon, Goodreads, and LibraryThing to chart the popularity and relevance of colonial romance in the present times. Online reviews range from a few words to lengthy observations. Some readers also left an indication of a detailed review on their blog. Four such blogs were visited in the course of the study to collect data of the reader’s response to the novel.
The study began with Amazon.com, the largest e-commerce marketplace set up in 1994, and followed on to the Amazon storefronts in England, Amazon.co.uk and Canada, Amazon.ca. The book has garnered 32 reviews on Amazon.com and 84 in the UK. The Canada storefront had four reviews. I then turned to Goodreads, a social cataloguing website set up in 2006 that allows users to search, catalogue, and review books. Though Amazon bought Goodreads in 2013, book reviewing on Goodreads is disconnected from sales, which are the primary focus of the Amazon platform. There were 78 reviews of Barber’s Tanamera on Goodreads. Following Goodreads, Librarything is the next largest social cataloguing website, set up a year before Goodreads. Librarything had seven reviews of Barber’s book. The study also turned to reader reviews on blogs and websites. These were selected via virtual snowball sampling where some reviews on the above-mentioned sites led to reader blogs.
These reviews were analysed using thematic content analysis. The reviews were coded in terms of recurring ideas, which were subsequently refined into thematic codes. In the later discussion, the study will report these findings with the descriptive analysis illustrated through exemplary reviews.
Therefore the study uses a reader-response approach, with its focus on the way readers respond to literature on an emotional level, and the way these responses are crucial to understanding the work. Rejecting New Criticism’s conceptualization of a text as a “well-wrought urn”, it reinstates the response of the reader at the centre of the artistic process. Theorists like Louise Rosenblatt, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss have underlined the co-creation of textual meaning through a transactional process between the text and the reader. Iser (1978) theorizes the existence of a text in the space between the artistic pole, created by the author, and the aesthetic pole, realized by the reader. Though the artistic pole guides the reader’s aesthetic response, the gap between them leaves the textual meaning indeterminate. Stanley Fish (1998), on the other hand, insists on affective stylistics. He describes the experience of reading as a three-fold process: readers surrender themselves to the text, subsequently they understand and respond to the content of the story, and, finally, readers should be able to describe their reading experience by structuring their reading responses, which may be in conflict with the common interpretation of a work. Fish’s affective stylistics offers an effective tool to read the reviews on the websites, which provide space to readers to express their comprehension of textual meaning.
But before turning to the reader’s responses on the internet, one needs to attend to the question of the legitimacy of amateur reviews and their impact on literary tastes. While there have been several studies on the review process on websites like Amazon and their impact on customers (Chen et al., 2008; Gretzel and Fesenmaier, 2006), few are concerned with the reader’s response, her sentiments or taste. Moreover, these studies are caught between two poles — one where the internet is lauded for democratizing literary taste, and the other, which challenges the authority of the amateur reviews. In November 2006, John Sutherland, a professor of literature at University College London, published an article in the Telegraph criticizing online reviews for the degradation of literary taste: “Why do the web-reviewers allow themselves to be recruited as unpaid hacks […] because they enjoy shooting off their mouths. And they enjoy the power” (2006: n.p.). This unease over review practices on the internet illustrates the challenge that the internet has brought about in the domain of professional criticism and literary analysis. Sutherland’s remarks led the novelist Susan Hill and many others to come out in favour of online reviews, claiming that amateur web reviewers now wield more power than newspapers. While in the past personal opinions, points of view, or reading recommendations in print were limited to letters to the editor or subcultural magazines and fanzines, today the internet offers diverse platforms for the reading public to review, comment, and give recommendations. Apart from Amazon, websites like Goodreads and LibraryThing as well as readers’ blogs have grown over time, complementing and challenging the sphere of professional criticism. However, Sutherland’s reaction can be seen in the light of Jürgen Habermas’s (1991/1962) argument that freedom is simply an illusion in modern society, as individuals will always be ideologically produced by others. Seen in the context of Amazon, where book reviews and recommendations are tied to the sale of books, Habermas’ insistence that people have transformed a reasoning culture into a consuming culture seems to hold true. The influence of the online reviews leads readers to read the text, thereby driving the sale, popularity, and further reading of the text (Gretzel and Fesenmaier, 2006).
On the other hand, in a critique of Habermas, Mark Poster argues that Habermas’ model cannot encapsulate the effects of modern technology in its entirety, and that the “formation of canons and authorities is seriously undermined by the electronic nature of texts” (2001: 188). Poster claims that new concepts are required to understand what happens to the practices of reading, writing, and literary criticism in a technology-driven society. The internet, through tools like reviewer anonymity, offers greater social freedom where readers are free to express their emotional responses unselfconsciously, making space for the intensity of likes and dislikes which frequently characterizes personal opinions (Katz and Rice, 2002). In this context, one needs to consider Sutherland’s question “Why do the web-reviewers allow themselves to be recruited as unpaid hacks?” in a reasonable manner. A strong motivation for writing book reviews online is the desire to connect with others, mainly through community-creating comments. Public forums on the internet provide what sociologist Elizabeth Long has called “the social infrastructure of reading” (2003: 8). Echoing Stanley Fish’s idea of interpretive communities, Long insists that one needs to shift attention from writer-centred and text-centred readings to a focus on reader-centreed activities. Apart from Long, Janice Radway’s influential study of women’s readership and romance highlights reading as an intensely social act in which amateur discussions evaluate texts without the precepts about literary quality and value that undergird professional criticism. Hence online reviews and exchanges can be read in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of culture, field, and habitus. In Bourdieu’s framework, the habitus constitutes the dispositions of an agent through which she acts in the world, and the fields are the social structures in which the agent finds herself. While those outside the field might be indifferent to these structures, the agents who participate play their roles in the given habitus in all earnestness (1998: 86). An analysis of readers’ response to Tanamera sheds light on the practices of a lay readership, their opinions and approaches throwing them in sharp relief against literary and professional critique.
Findings: “A great read”
Tanamera has enjoyed continued popularity four decades after its publication. The recent release of the book in digital format testifies to its continued readership. Nearly 30 reviewers on Amazon mentioned that they were reading the book again after decades and thanked Amazon for enabling them to “revisit” Tanamera.
Of the 32 readers’ reviews on Amazon.com, 75 percent rated the book with five stars, 19 percent with four, and six percent with one star. Of this six percent, which constituted two critical reviews, one articulated a problem with the book’s delivery from Amazon. Hence only one review found the content objectionable, calling the book “Laughable Stereotypical Schlock”. The most recent review was dated February 2018 while the oldest was from July 2004. 23 out of 32 reviews were “verified purchases”, indicating that the reader–reviewers had bought the book from Amazon.
The UK storefront of Amazon showed similar results. 77 percent of the reviews on the Amazon.co.uk rated the book with five stars, followed by 17 percent reviews giving it a four-star rating. Another five percent and one percent gave the book three and one stars respectively. Amazon.co.uk captured reviews from 2019 to 2002. 75 percent of these reviews were from those who had purchased the books from Amazon.co.uk and three of the negative reviews were about the quality of services provided by Amazon.
Goodreads, on the other hand, disassociates the book from bookselling. Hence the comments were mostly on the content, the story, writing style, and so on. With 988 ratings and 78 reviews, the book had garnered an excellent rating of 4.14 out of five. Yet there were stronger voices of criticism on Goodreads. Nearly 60 readers gave the book either two or one stars. Though this number is small given the astounding 988 readers participating in the book rating, several readers criticized Tanamera for being “old fashioned and outdated”, an “unfocused mess of a thing”, or called it out for “hideous misogyny, racism, homophobia and classism”, and being “full of cliches, plain old sexism, racism, entitlement and arrogant imperialist superiority of the white English male characters over everyone else”. Readers point out the absence of a Singaporean point of view, despite the central position of Soongs in the narrative: “It does not, however, look into the Soongs though they are always present”. Julie’s villainous cousin from China is described as “a caricature villain in every sense”. Blogger Elerigrace, while calling out the novel for a too-perfect portrayal of Julie which does not arouse any emotional attachment, cites other well-etched female characters in the novel like John’s lover, Vicki and his wife, Irene. Hence in comparison to the English women characters, one reviewer described Julie as an “empty hull”: “She’s another (white) male fantasy […] she has no soul. I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a perfect fictional woman […] with so much shining perfection Julie is never really more than an Asian Barbie doll.”
Yet the book has a formidable set of favourable reviews. An interesting case was an apologia for Barber’s text published on a blog where the reader acknowledges the problematic aspects of Tanamera:
Some of the recent reviews have criticized Barber for elitism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. No, this novel is not politically correct by today’s standards, but can we really hold older books to current standards? The authorial voice and that of the protagonist ring true for the historical context. (Elerigrace, 2018: n.p.)
Thus, “even with this recent more critical re-read”, the reader insists, “Tanamera still measures up to the satisfaction scale”.
This positive sentiment is evident in the Goodreads cataloguing lists. Since Goodreads allows readers to catalogue books into lists based on similar themes and content, apart from appearing in lists of historical romance, World War Two fiction, and Commonwealth fiction, Tanamera was also catalogued on lists like “The Unknown, Hidden Gems of Historical Fiction”, “The Sun Never Sets on the British empire”, “Long good books for voracious readers”, and “Best romances we read over and over again”.
The reviews classified the book variously as “epic historical romantic saga”, “part history part romance”, and “a great historical novel”. History and forbidden romance were discussed consistently as the main themes of the novel. While most of the readers derived enjoyment and pleasure out of reading, many insisted that the book “educated” them on the history of Singapore. Unlike the academic contestation over the boundaries between the disciplines of history and literature, reviewers saw the overlap between history and fiction as natural, even fascinating, as it lends depth to the oft-repeated plot of star-crossed lovers. A blogger called catasholiday loved “the family saga style of storytelling that takes you through the years of a family while you experience the history that has shaped the place where the story is set”. Several reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads made references to James Mitchener, James Clavell, and Herman Wouk, demonstrating their familiarity with the genre. Many recommended the novel for its plot and characterization, although as we shall see in the next section, some most vociferous criticism was also levelled at these very elements of Tanamera.
About 25 readers from across the sites explicitly mentioned their familiarity with Singapore. They had been to Singapore and insisted that Barber’s books brought back memories of places and landscapes. One of the readers on Amazon revealed that he had
served in Malaya during the emergency and experienced the way of life for a European in the dying days of the British Empire. As I read this book, I relived the wonderfull [sic] climate, various place names in Singapore brought back many memories, some good, some not so good. and of course the many different smells that permeated the air (not all of them were nice) reading this book took me back to what in many ways was a wonderfull [sic] part of my life. I would like to thank the auther [sic] for certainly giving me so much pleasure.
Two other readers mentioned that their family and relatives had been in Singapore during the Second World War. Others had been to Singapore on holiday, and one mentioned that the book served as a “travel guide” to the country.
The reviews, especially the blogs, discuss the quality and style of writing as well as the reading experience. Although some reviews are short, many longer pieces address these qualities in depth. Discussions around the author and his journalistic background, which was often taken as a guarantee of accuracy and authenticity, arose frequently (in over 70 reviews in total). Many readers appreciated the style of the book which sustains interest despite its length: Tanamera is nearly 800 pages long.
Reading the romance: Star-crossed lovers
A deeper analysis of these reviews offers an insight into the fascination with the genre and the way it shapes collective memory. Tanamera’s publication in 1981 came after the surge of anticolonial nationalism in the colonies and their subsequent independence. Moreover, the emergence of postcolonial theory during the latter decades of the twentieth century has reshaped the field of literary studies. The repeated mention of “the colonial saga”, “story of white settlers”, “rubber plantation saga”, “the financial empire of the Dexters”, and “colonial viewpoint” even in the favourable reviews illustrates an awareness of postcolonial discourse amongst the reading public. Since the reviews are dated to recent years, it is interesting to analyse readers’ sentiments with respect to these contexts.
Before turning to the reviews, it is important to note the demographic trends of these websites. The most vocal critique of the book on Goodreads to some extent can be explained by its demographic. While the traffic on Goodreads is dominated by America and the United Kingdom (about 40 percent in May 2019), it has a sizeable number of visitors from counties like India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Nearly 46 percent of the visitors were women between the age of 18 and 44. 4 On the other hand, nearly 75 percent of visitors on Amazon.co.uk were from the UK. 5 Similarly, Amazon.com is dominated by 8.5 million visitors from the US per month. 6 Hence the critique of the novel on Goodreads can, to a large extent, be attributed to its female readership, and in several cases, from the erstwhile colonies (as the information about their geographical information volunteered on the website reveals).
By comparing a novel with others by the same author or within the same genre, reviewers demonstrate their acquaintance with a wider literary field in which to locate the novel. Several readers criticized Barber for following a similar plot in all his books, recommending other readers not to read all of them in one go. Others insist that this was their “favorite of Barber’s books”. Moreover, when ascribing genres to the novel like “historical saga”, “a great cross-cultural romance”, or a “sweeping historical epic”, readers show an awareness of genre conventions: “storyline running through is as powerful today as it ever was: boy meets girl = problems!”, “A great love story and after all sorts of setbacks and disappointments, true love finally prevailed”. By identifying the generic patterns and conventions, reviewers display a distinct literary competence. Unlike Sutherland’s critique of amateur reviews, then, online reviewers do display knowledge of literary codes and conventions, though the presence of the methods and theories of literary analysis is limited, and often deeply embedded in the socio-cultural attitudes of the reviewers. Thus the reviews often demonstrate cultural capital, a form of capital arising from the knowledge of the text as well as of the system and protocols of online reviews. Moreover, on the space provided by the internet websites, readers create a digital social network or social capital, where the reader’s response emerges as a complex social act.
Herein also lies a further divergence between academic critique and online readers’ reviews. While the former focuses on textual analysis, the amateur reviews centre on the readers and their experience of the book. This is also indicated by the frequent use of expressions like “a delightful read”, “enjoyable”, “gripping”, “captivating” to describe the experience of reading. One of the readers described the impact of the reading as follows: “somewhere inside me welled up an unexpressed desire to read more fiction like this, a desire that is now reshaping itself into a need to write novels set in the dramatic years of WWII”.
At the same time, the reader reviews often echoed professional discourse built around the novel. While some readers criticize it for its content and style, most agree that it is “a rollicking good read”. The assessment echoes the Washington Post review of “Singapore Stories” (1981): “Without wasting a page analyzing fine shades of sensibility in the manner of Proust, Barber still manages to evoke colonial Singapore down to the last curry tiffin. His purpose, clearly, is a rattling good read”. Or the Kirkus Review (1981), which sums up Tanamera as “all in all, a sturdy — if not original or especially dramatic — multi-generational, two-family saga”.
Between colonialism and nostalgia: “The epitome of ‘dolce vita’”
More problematic is the reader’s appreciation of the content which, though recognized as distinctly colonial, ignores the deeply exploitative nature of Dexter’s business and relationships in Singapore and Malaya. As mentioned above, the references to the colonial enterprise and the empire in the reviews indicate an awareness that the story is set amid the discourses of colonialism. Yet the mention of dubious dealings, of massacres and tortures during the Japanese occupation, is curiously absent in the reviews, even though Tanamera mentions these episodes.
The appeal of Tanamera lies in the nostalgia that diffuses through the text. As one of the reviewers says: “all the stories I heard growing up were vividly brought to life by Barber’s characters and descriptions. I loved this book!” Another reader insists that the book “made me wish I was Singaporean; to have grown up in that grand house with the hundred-year-walls”. This sentiment lies behind nearly 25 percent of the readers re-reading the text, and many others mentioning that they would be returning to the book “again and again”. It is a sentiment that the readers are often well aware of: “a good bit of my own attachment to this novel is probably nostalgia. It is, and likely always will be, the literary equivalent of comfort food for me”.
Such nostalgia dovetails with the emplotment of history as romance. Outlining the contours of nostalgic consciousness, Fred Davis describes it in terms of
a heightened focus on things past along with an enhanced credence in them, accompanied by considerable musing, mild detachment from the affairs of everyday life, an essentially appreciative stance toward the self and attenuation of that sense of we-ness which in everyday life frames and constrains our conduct. (1979: 81)
This definition reveals some crucial aspects of nostalgia. Firstly the longing (algia) for home (nostos) expressed by nostalgia is in effect a longing for the past. The homesickness of a nostalgic displaces the temporal loss — the loss of time — to the spatial metaphor of home. Thus the Singapore that the readers long for is not a spatial entity but a temporal and an imaginary one: a colony “laced with facts, sounds & smells of Malaya, with the heat of Singapore”, as a reader mentions. What frequently captivated the readers were “[l]ifestyles of the rich in Singapore” and “the idyllic realm of colonial kingdoms of bygone years”.
Contemporary scholars have associated such nostalgia with a “search for a lost coherence” (Hutcheon, 2000) or as Boym insists, “a romance with one’s own fantasy” (Boym 2007: 7), or “a positively toned evocation of a lived past in the context of some negative feeling toward present or impending circumstance” (Davis, 1979: 31). This is evident in Barber’s description of writing Tanamera: “It was my house in Bukit Timah, my marriage that broke up. It was quite a wrench to change the names after 2000,000 words. I had started to believe it all” (Barber, qtd. in Mahabubani, 1980: 9). This nostalgia permeates Tanamera through stylistic techniques such as the first-person narrator who is extradiegetic and homodiegetic; that is, a narrator who is a part of the story and also the one who is in charge of all levels of the narrative (Salmose, 2012: 209). Thus the sentiment of loss underpins colonial nostalgia, concentrating on the loss of lifestyle, an “endless round of parties, picnics, dining, tennis, and swimming”, and the socio-economic prosperity which one associates with the heyday of the empire — “the epitome of ‘dolce vita’”, as one of the readers points out.
An important dimension of the reader’s nostalgia is its temporal aspect. Though several reviewers insist on the accuracy of the text, mostly supported by Barber’s journalistic credentials, nostalgia creates a transitory space for indulging in memories that might not be politically correct but are nevertheless “pleasurable”. Several readers point to the book as their favourite holiday read. To a large extent, this reading is framed by the novel’s paratexts, especially book covers and blurbs. The cover of the 1981 Macmillan edition, for instance, shows a glimpse of the front of a large white mansion viewed through lush tropical foliage in the foreground. The Palladian front with large Doric columns — the staple architectural features of the colonial mansions in Malaya — seen at a distance through the palm leaves evokes a sense of longing. The blurb underscores this wistfulness: “Tanamera sweeps from the steamy British ruled Malaya of the 1930s, through the bloody days of Japanese occupation, to the tumultuous birth of a new nation”. History is interlaced with romance: “Their love was as inevitable as it is forbidden — and the price they are to pay is beyond their wildest imaginings”. The Bantam edition has a mansion in the background. The foreground is dominated by an Asian woman with a hibiscus flower in her hair looking directly at the reader. Beneath her, a couple — an English man and an Asian woman — stand in a romantic posture. The cover features an endorsement by M. M Kaye: “An exceedingly good book, one of the can’t put down breed”. In the blurb, Leslie Thomas insists that “Noel Barber knows his territory and its people’ (emphasis mine). This paratext frames the nostalgic longing and creates a sense of transitoriness in the narrative which makes it “a good holiday read”.
Thus, several readers claim that the book enabled them to experience the “pastness” of the past, bracketed and separated off from the present. To these readers, the book brought back memories of their visit to Singapore or the holiday on which they “picked up the book”. It made them feel more connected to the place where they had spent their time. As one of the readers announces: “It is a good read if you have been to Singapore”.
This association of the book with the colonial past is problematic, since the “function of remembering is not to transform the past but to promote a commitment to the group by symbolizing its values and aspirations […] By conforming the past to its conceptions, the group’s memory conveys an illusion of timelessness and continuity” (Misztal, 2003: 51–52). Hence the romance, imbued with visions of a colonial past, informs the reader’s view of present-day Singapore and Malaya as well as their own identity vis-à-vis the colonial past. More than the longing for the past, such yearning points to the deficits of the present. John J. Su (2005) cites the instance of the British estate novel (to which genre Tanamera could belong, albeit an estate in a colony) to point out the turbulent present — the migrations and movements of the population following colonialism, the shift in geopolitical power, the economic downturns, and the far-reaching changes in the socio-cultural fabric of Britain — as the root of its nostalgic narrative. Driven by migration from the colonies to the erstwhile metropole, the movement of the colonized migrant to England was perceived not as a legacy of British colonial enterprise but of the process of decolonization. The movement of migrants from former colonies to the metropole disturbed the usual order as regards the colonial flow of populations, as well as changing the socio-cultural landscape of the metropole. In the face of such disruptions, colonial epics and romances manufactured a nostalgia that not only played on these fears but glorified the days of the empire as the time of civilization and order. Similar impulses are evident in Barber’s books as well as the readers’ reviews.
As is the case with all mythmaking, such nostalgic narratives are built on amnesia, on insistent forgetting of certain aspects of the past. In the book and its reviews, the sentiment of nostalgia overcomes the ineptitude of British authorities that led to the Fall of Singapore. Commenting on the “staggering incompetence of the authorities”, one reviewer says that she was “amazed that we ever won a war with the morons in high places”. And yet it is the time and place that the reader yearns to visit. Benedict Anderson (2006/1983) highlights what he calls the characteristic device of remembering/forgetting in the construction of national genealogies, especially when referring to pivotal events in the national history such as battles, massacres, and civil wars. The citizens are simultaneously obliged to remember and to “already have forgotten” the disturbing parts (Anderson, 2006/1983: 200–201). Thus the narratives of nostalgia and heroism are underscored by the device of forgetting more than remembering.
Framing the collective memory
In his interview with The Strait Times, Barber relates Somerset Maugham’s advice on the publication of Tanamera: “My dear Noel, never bother about the reviews as long as the book sells” (Maugham qtd in Chuah, 1981). Indeed, the re-release of the book as an e-book is a testimony to Tanamera’s popularity that might puzzle if one judges the book by its literary merit. But as the above discussion shows, genres like colonial romance build on the colonial imaginary of the empire and shape its collective memory. Several reviewers acknowledge the book as their source of knowledge about the colonial history of Singapore. As one of the reviewers reflects: “Noel Barber made history romantic. History classes in school somehow got a little more exciting with the images he created”. In this context, recommendations of Barber’s book, especially of its mythmaking where the colonial enterprise not only brings prosperity to Singapore but also saves it during the war, sound a note of apprehension. The sustaining images of war in Tanamera largely write out the Singaporeans, with only a brief mention of Paul Soong being tortured by the Japanese. There are brief mentions of violence perpetrated during the Occupation, or the political wrangling that went on in the years after the Japanese Occupation. Since Tanamera follows its British protagonist and his exploits during the war, the novel fulfills its ideological intent — of renewing the images of British heroism, a task that had been a priority in the years following the war.
Furthermore, the motif of “star-crossed” lovers struggling against the racial barriers forms a large part of the enduring appeal of the book. It also provides a “narrative formula” which gestures towards reconciliation between groups that are positioned antagonistically within colonial hierarchies — the colonizer and the colonized. In the final union of John and Julie, “the bourgeois ideal of the nuclear family, married to the national ideal of the unified populace, produces a revisionist historical narrative that contains dissent in the service of national unity” (Davis, 2013: 65).
Thus the book is not so much about the fall and recovery of Singapore and Malaya; it is a British account of it, and one that has been retrospectively reimagined. As a site of memory, it acts as a placeholder for the colonizer’s story. Since most of the readers did not witness the events, the memories of the collectivity are vicarious, shaped by a reservoir of accounts — written, visual, oral including photographs, documentaries, museums, histories, and novels. Rushdie insists that “it really is necessary to make a fuss about Raj fiction and the zombie-like revival of the defunct Empire. The various films and TV shows and books I discussed earlier propagate a number of notions about history which must be quarrelled with, as loudly and as embarrassingly as possible” (1984: n.p.). As such, I chose to concentrate on Tanamera and its problematic popularity. Most readers were aware that the book was a “long way from the modern world of today’s Singapore”. In that sense, while the text manifests restorative nostalgia to recapture the colonial past, the reader’s awareness of “the imperfect process of remembrance” is indicative of a reflexive nostalgia that is conscious of the impossible nature of such desire (Boym, 2001: 41). Reflexive nostalgia dwells on the process of mourning rather than recapturing the past. Though the readers repeatedly display their awareness of postcolonial discourse which they bring to bear in their reading of the book, there is an active form of forgetting that pushes away such awareness when it gets in the way of the pleasures of reading. One reader criticizes the portrayal of the Dexters for the “arrogant imperialist superiority of the white English male characters over everyone else”. Yet, she goes on to say: “in spite of all the above criticism, I still give the book four stars as it took me on an incredible journey to an incredible land, and now I want to read more of Barber’s books”. Another reviewer who gave the book a four-star rating insists that “it is ‘ok’ as a book of introduction to Singapore and what it once was, but if you really want to get to know the place, I would recommend some local modern writing, especially from the 1990s”.
The continuing popularity of a text like Tanamera, despite a storyline that glorifies British colonialism, reveals the deeply problematic nature of collective remembering and voluntary forgetting which feeds colonial mythologies. In her study of social remembering, Barbara Misztal points out that “we remember as members of social groups, and this means assuming and internalizing the common traditions and social representations shared by our collectivities” (2003: 12). So, if Barber’s text can be read in the context of Thatcherite nostalgia for the empire, then readers’ engagement with the text reflects ongoing strains of what Paul Gilroy (2001) calls postcolonial melancholia. “It is, at root, the morbid core of England and Englishness in remorseless decline, the same strain that feeds interminable and increasingly desperate speculations about the content and character of the shrinking culture that makes England distinctive” (Gilroy, 2001: 162). The popular revisionist look at Britain’s imperialist past reflects the enduring consequences of the empire, implicated in the current schisms of a multicultural society where Englishness is perceived as being under threat by an influx of migrants and changing geopolitical equations. What is particularly interesting is that contrary to expectations, the space offered by the online platforms, which are meant to democratize reading and sharing of ideas, emerges as a place to articulate colonial triumphalism. In such a scenario, the readers’ response to colonial fiction becomes a measure of the extent to which nostalgia for the Empire overcomes the awareness of its exploitative and unjust core; and, at the same time, it creates a social group bound by this longing for the past. Similar studies on reader response, especially via the reviews on online platforms, can help reveal how the dominant trends of thoughts and ideologies permeate the world of amateur readership. Furthermore, this approach calls for a focus on popular fictions, which are usually read outside the academic setting — but are vastly popular and therefore instrumental in shaping collective memories. A large number of readers insisted on enjoying Tanamera and learning from it. The critique of the empire, its exploitative ventures and trauma inflicted on the colonized, are largely missing from the text as well as the reviews. The past, perfected by nostalgic consciousness, elides the traumas of history. Such recall, as presented in Tanamera and other texts of colonial romance, hints at the frameworks of colonialism that continue to inform ways of understanding the world.
