Colonialism – but in good
Anthony Burgess was himself a teacher in Malaya
Quelle: Getty Images/Hulton Archive/Ulf Andersen
He went to Malaya as a teacher and returned as a writer: Anthony Burgess made his breakthrough with three novels about people in the British colony. He then became world famous with “A Clockwork Orange”. Now you can finally read the Malaya trilogy in German.
Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) is remembered in this country almost exclusively as the author of the classic “A Clockwork Orange”. Most of the other books are no longer available in German, or they never were. After all, Klett-Cotta has laudably kept the novel of the century “The Prince of the Phantoms” in the program for decades. The small publisher Elsinor deserves even more praise for daring to publish Burgess’ Malaya Trilogy in German for the first time, in a translation by Ludger Tolksdorf.
“Now a Tiger”, “The Enemy in the Blanket” and “Betten im Orient”, with which the trilogy is now complete, belong to the like “A Clockwork Orange” or “Earthly Powers” (German “Prince of the Phantoms”) world literature, and they’ve become even more interesting because colonialism is a hot topic these days. Anyone who reads these books through the lens of Said’s “Orientalism” critique and post-colonial, however, will quickly become insane (if this expression is still permitted), because Burgess portrays all the characters of the British colony of Malaya with the sharp eye of the satirist – by no means only the whites.
The ethnic groups of Malaya – apart from the Malays, these are the economically dominant Chinese, Javanese as well as Tamils, Sikhs and other peoples of the Indian subcontinent – are united in their dislike of the colonial rulers. As they prepare to withdraw in the mid-1950s, hatred among the Orientals breaks out. It is fueled by competition for positions in the soon-to-be-independent state and by the vast amounts of alcohol that they all drink, including the Muslims.
In the midst of these intrigues, which they hardly see through, for three novels stand the idealistic teacher Victor Crabbe, who believes he has to carry the “white man’s burden” in Malaya, and his wife Fenella, a blonde goddess who is the object of many desires. Crabbe realized in the colony: “that white skin was an abnormality and the way of life of the white man was essentially eccentric”. But the other characters are also eccentric: their gay cook, who fled from a forced marriage. The Sikh who has it in his head to compete with the Chinese traders instead of working with security, weapons or the police like all Sihks do. The drunk Eurasian cop who swindles the Crabbes into buying a car but lets them share his lottery win. The new cook, an old Chinese, who uses the leftovers from meals to help his son-in-law with the jungle guerrillas. And many more like it.
The humor with which Burgess portrays them all is not that of the condescending know-it-all (the standard attitude of today’s satire), but it is one of humanity, an understanding of the contradictions of his protagonists and a love for the country and the people that Burgess treats himself to prescribed for a few years as a young teacher. For Burgess, who found himself as a writer here (the three novels were his first books accepted for publication), Malaya was a yearning country in a complicated way, you can feel it.