The Malayan Trilogy


The Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy in the United States, is a comic 'triptych' of novels by Anthony Burgess set amidst the decolonisation of Malaya.
It is a detailed fictional exploration of the effects of the Malayan Emergency and of Britain's final withdrawal from its Southeast Asian territories. The American title, decided on by Burgess himself, is taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses: 'The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: | The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep | Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, | 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.'
The three volumes are:
  • Time for a Tiger
  • The Enemy in the Blanket
  • Beds in the East
The trilogy tracks the fortunes of the history teacher Victor Crabbe, his professional difficulties, his marriage problems, and his attempt to do his duty in the war against the insurgents.

Time for a Tiger

Time for a Tiger, the first part of the trilogy, is dedicated, in Jawi script on the first page of the book, "to all my Malayan friends". It was Burgess's first published work of fiction and appeared in 1956. The title alludes to an advertising slogan for Tiger beer, then, as now, popular in the Malay peninsula. The action centres on the vicissitudes of Victor Crabbe, a history teacher at an elite school for all the peninsula's ethnic groups – Malay Chinese and Indian – the Mansor School, in Kuala Hantu.
Victor Crabbe, a resident teacher at the Mansor School, seeks to tackle the threat posed by a boy Communist who appears to be conducting clandestine night-time indoctrination sessions with fellow students. But the headmaster, Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings.
Nabby Adams, an alcoholic police lieutenant who prefers warm beer, persuades Crabbe to buy a car, enabling Adams to make a commission as a middleman. This is despite the fact that Crabbe will not drive because of a traumatic car accident in which his first wife died and he was the driver.
Crabbe's marriage to the blonde Fenella is crumbling, while he carries on an affair with a Malay divorcee employed at a nightclub. A junior police officer who works for Adams, Alladad Khan, moonlights as a driver for the couple. Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh, a gay cook, works for the couple but is being pursued by the wife he has fled from after being forced to marry her by his family.
The threads of the plot come together when Alladad Khan drives Crabbe, Fenella and Adams to a nearby village, along a route where they face possible ambush by Chinese terrorists. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they return late to the school's speech day and an unexpected chain of events follows that transforms the lives of all the main characters.

''The Enemy in the Blanket''

The title is a literal translation of the Malay idiom "musuh dalam selimut", which means to be betrayed by an intimate, alluding to the struggles of marriage but also other betrayals in the story. The novel charts the continuing adventures of Victor Crabbe, who becomes headmaster of a school in the imaginary sultanate of Dahaga in the years and months leading up to Malayan independence.
Crabbe is made headmaster of a school in Dahaga, in the east coast of Malaya.
Burgess was dismayed by the design of the cover of the 1958 Heinemann edition of the novel, presumably designed in London. It shows a Sikh working as a ricksha-puller, something unheard of in Malaya or anywhere else. He wrote in his autobiography : "The design on dust-jacket showed a Sikh pulling a white man and woman in a jinrickshaw. I, who had always looked up to publishers, was discovering that they could be as inept as authors. The reviewers would blame me, not the cover-designer, for that blatant display of ignorance."

''Beds in the East''

The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra II.vi.49–52: 'The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't.'

Main characters

  • Victor Crabbe, initially a resident teacher at the Mansor School, seeks to tackle the threat posed by a boy Communist who appears to be conducting clandestine night-time indoctrination sessions with fellow students. But the headmaster, Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings. Crabbe later becomes a headmaster and, in the third book, an education officer.
  • Fenella, Crabbe's second wife
  • Nabby Adams, an alcoholic police lieutenant who prefers warm beer. He persuades Crabbe to buy a car, enabling Adams to make a commission as a middleman, even though Crabbe will not drive because of a traumatic car accident in which his first wife died and he was the driver.
  • Ah Wing, Crabbe's elderly Chinese cook, who, it emerges, has been supplying the insurgents with provisions
  • Ibrahim, the Crabbes’ transvestite servant who fears being found by his wife whom he was forced to marry by his family
  • Abdul Kadir, Crabbe's hard-drinking and foul-mouthed teaching colleague at the school, whose every sentence includes the words "For fuck's sake!"
  • The hard-up lawyer Rupert Hardman , who converts to Islam in order to wed a domineering Muslim woman, 'Che Normah, for her money. He later bitterly regrets it and tries to return to the West in order to escape the marriage.
  • Talbot , the State Education Officer, a fat-buttocked gourmand whom Victor Crabbe cuckolds, and who himself cuckolded Crabbe years earlier
  • Anne Talbot, Talbot's wife, a wanton but unhappy adulteress
  • The womanising Abang of Dahaga, who is also a devotee of chess, and who aims both to seduce Crabbe's wife and to purloin his car
  • Father Laforgue, a priest who has spent most of his life in China and longs to return there. but is prevented from doing so, having been banished by the Communist regime
  • Jaganathan , a fellow teacher who plots to supplant and ruin Crabbe
  • Mohinder Singh, a shopkeeper trying desperately, and failing, to compete with Chinese traders
  • Robert Loo, a brilliant boy composer whose musical career Crabbe seeks to further
  • Rosemary Michael, an "eminently nubile" Tamil with "quite considerable capacity for all kinds of sensuous pleasure" and an inability to tell the truth, even to herself
  • Tommy Jones, a beer salesman. "That's my line. I sell beer all over the East. Thirty years on the job. Three thousand a month and a car allowance and welcome wherever I go."
  • Lim Cheng Po, an Anglophile lawyer
  • Tuan Haji Mohammed Nasir Bin Abdul Talib, an Australian judge who harbours a secret resentment against the English
  • Moneypenny, an anthropologist living in the Malayan jungle and studying hill tribes. He has lost touch with civilisation to the extent that he believes it is lethal to laugh at butterflies and "now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory".

Editions

Initially published by Heinemann in discrete volumes, all known editions have since included all three novels in one volume. The list below excludes out-of-print editions, notably the paperback editions published by Penguin and Minerva in Britain, and W. W. Norton's hardback edition published in the United States in 1964.
  • Burgess, Anthony The Malayan Trilogy. . This is the only edition that includes Burgess's retrospective introduction.
  • Burgess, Anthony The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy. . U.S. paperback edition.

Works of criticism

  • Bloom, Harold Anthony Burgess. .
  • Lewis, Roger Anthony Burgess. . A biography of Burgess.
  • Yahya, Zawiah Resisting Colonialist Discourse. .
  • Kerr, Douglas Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing . pp 191–196.
  • Erwin, Lee 'Britain's Small Wars: Domesticating "Emergency"', in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, Piette, A. and M. Rawlinson . pp. 81–89.