The garden of evening mists (by Tan Twan Eng)

(Amazon UK link)

I had never heard of Tan Twan Eng. And while the cover of the book ‘The garden of evening mists’ is quite appealing, with some excellent reviews, I doubt if I’d have picked it up to read by chance. However, it was the allocated book for this month’s reading group, so I bought it (used) from the ‘World of books’ site last year, and read it over a few days before the meeting.

The first chapter is a bit confusing, though it’s confidently - and, in places, poetically - told. The whole book is in the first person, narrated by a Chinese woman called Yun Ling. The opening paragraph mentions her seeing the Emperor of Japan when she was twenty-seven, and that terrible things were done to her and her sister.

Then the action moves forward by thirty-six years. Yun Ling has retired early from a high-powered job as a judge. She’s come to a house where she used to know a man called Aritomo used to leave. There’s a Chinese servant living there, who remembers her from over three decades earlier. She hasn’t returned there since. Yun Ling is about to meet an art expert who is going to examine some of Aritomo’s work. 

The action moves forwards and backwards regularly; I quickly realised that the ‘present day’ section, involving the retired Yun Ling in her sixties, is all written in the present tense. But it’s not always obvious when the ‘past’ sections take place; it would have helped to have an indication of the date, or at least the year, I think. 

Not that it mattered all that much, as (in my view) the narrative becomes really very slow and rambling after the introductory chapters. Indeed, if it hadn’t been a book club choice I might have abandoned it. It wasn’t the kind of book I wanted to dip into at every odd moments, and even when I had an hour to myself I couldn’t read for more than about half an hour as my mind wandered. 

There are lots of themes in the book, including Japanese gardens, and memories, and the struggle of women to be heard in a male-orientated society. Much of it is set in a period of which I knew almost nothing, in Malaysia (known as Malaya at the time) when the Japanese had occupied the country and were treating many of the inhabitants brutally. We don’t learn exactly what happened to Yun Ling and her sister when they were teens until almost the end of the book, but by then it’s fairly obvious what is coming.

The second half of the book is a bit more interesting, although there’s a lot of description and the pace is really very slow. It’s beautiful writing - quite poetic in places, but I found myself wishing that the author had written a lot of it as poetry and kept it out of the novel. I skimmed several paragraphs, sometimes whole pages when my mind was elsewhere, and didn’t lose any of the story, as far as I can tell. 

I also found it difficult distinguishing the different places and people. Some of the characters had quite similar names, and at times I found it very difficult remembering who was whom. 

But I think my main problem with the book is that the characters are all rather two-dimensional, and Yun Ling herself is not a very nice person. She had terrible trauma as a teenager, and has had to fight for everything she has; she’s clearly courageous, determined and highly intelligent. But she harbours anger and grudges, and she admits to being casually promiscuous. 

Much of the writing is beautifully evocative (if long-winded), and it’s a story that was worth telling - based on some of the realities of war, set in a culture I knew little about. It even prompted me to do a bit of research, to find out something of the situation. As such it’s a useful book from the historical point of view, demonstrating how even the best of people from any nation can behave appallingly in war situations. 

If you’re interested in this period of Asian history, or love poetic writing in novels, then may be worth trying. It's very highly reviewed in general and has won some prizes. But it didn’t move me, and I couldn’t relate to anyone; so it’s not one I’m likely to read again. 

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