The Devil's Garden (Nigel Barley)

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

_
Nigel Barley: The Devil's Garden. Love and war in Singapore under the 
Japanese Flag [2011]_

This superb little novel by the ethnologist Nigel Barley, which can be 
read as kinda Pacific sidepiece to Gravity's Rainbow, not only taught me 
many things about the region I didn't know but made me, strictly in 
terms of literature, go Wow! ... That social scientists write great 
literature is the absolute exception. Here it is the case. The story 
takes place between 1942, when Singapore became as a part of the 
Japanese Empire Syonanto, and 1945 when the city is suffering from the 
afterpains of the war; in between the Orchid House in the Botanic 
Gardens becomes a center of interactions between people from different 
ethnic groups. Barley, who even uses the infamous ant-comparison twice, 
is far away from being soft on Japan ("'Do you know why they are so 
"prolific"?' The man smiled. 'Death,' he said simply. 'It is life from 
death. We do not care to eat them ourselves so we sell them to the 
Japanese who gobble them down and always want more. There is a sort of 
justice in it, eating humble pie. One day the prawns will consume 
Japanese bodies and /then/ we will perhaps eat them but I do not think 
so.'", p. 142), but has, just like Pynchon in the case of Germany, 
complex characters from the nation in his novel and is also very 
critical of the British. You'll find Pynchonian humor ("Ong made a 
lemon-sucking face and reached to repossess fork and spoon. 'You bring 
tomorrow. You eat tomorrow.'/'Is that Confucius?'", p. 107), the creepy 
propaganda sound from Tokyo Rose ("/'This is Orphan Annie broadcasting 
to all my little orphan friends---I mean enemies---in the Pacific. Do 
you feel hated tonight? Are you worried about your wifes and ...'/", p. 
144), or the horror - "No. Not balloons. This must be something else, 
something far bigger, possibly something worse.", p. 199) - when the 
Chinese-Japanese love couple realizes that what's coming nearer is a 
B-29 Superfortress. It's a dark book, it's a funny book, --- do check 
this out!


http://www.monsoonbooks.com.sg/books/the-devils-garden-by-nigel-barley/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Barley_%28anthropologist%29
http://www.zeit.de/2015/31/ehtnologie-nigel-barley-subjektive-wissenschaft-kultur



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