Unlikely heroes in Singapore

Press, 16 June 1979, Page 17

Unlikely heroes in Singapore

The Singapore Grip. J. G. Farrell. Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 558 pp. $11.40. As an exercise in irony, “The Singapore Grip” makes interesting points, but as a novel “on the grand scale” (as the jacket blurb describes it) the book is less successful. There are no epic characters and few epic deeds to match their setting, and though the author describes the Japanese advance graphically, he takes the edge off his story with time spent detailing the warts on those who would be heroes and, to a lesser extent, by contrasting dramatic moments with ironic comedy that occasionally touches on the absurd. Mr Farrell freely uses a device whereby unlikely characters become heroes and those who aspire to heroic visions and postures lapse into blearyeyed posturing. The iconoclastic Mr Farrell has no sympathy for the smug,

hypocritical, exploiting English businessmen who made their fortunes in pre-war Singapore, but he spends so much time portraying their unattractive side that one could be forgiven for heaving a sigh of relief when the Japanese land. For this reader, the book swings along best when the author describes the invasion and advance down the Malayan peninsula. The novel’s central character and hero, Matthew Webb, is a little like “The Idiot” of Dostoyevsky — idealistic, eccentric, ingenuous (often exasperatingly so) — and with flashes of insight. One of Matthew’s most irritating habits is to wander round Singapore raising eyebrows or generating hoots of bawdy laughter by repeatedly asking the meaning of the “Singapore Grip.” At times Mr Farrell brightens his book with very funny passages, but Matthew’s recurring joke is not up to the thrashing it is given. The author portrays three meanings for his title: sexual, the hold the English colonial business community had on the city and on Malaya’s rubber, and the hold the Japanese tightened militarily. Mr Farrell shows clearly enough why the old colonial values could not last, whether or not the Japanese came io Singapore.