Emergency politics and the middlebrow novel: A comparative analysis of Han Suyin’s … and the Rain my Drink and Mary McMinnies’s The Flying Fox

ABSTRACT

In July 1956, Han Suyin’s novel of the Malayan Emergency was published in London and Singapore. … and the Rain my Drink is a fictional account of the communist insurgency and the British counter-insurgency campaign. What is often overlooked is that earlier that year the British author Mary McMinnies had published her “Emergency” novel The Flying Fox, which covers much of the same political ground as Han’s. This article views Han’s and McMinnies’s work as exemplars of middlebrow fiction. To narrate the end of empire, both texts employ literary devices associated with the middlebrow, alongside exotic imagery familiar from an earlier imperial tradition. Han’s narrative choices acquire, however, distinctive meanings in the Malayan context, associating the exotic with Malaya’s multi-ethnic political landscape, and the domestic tropes of the middlebrow with societal tensions and a newfound Asian confidence, whilst also revealing Asian sensitivities and imported western values.

KEYWORDS:

• Malayan Emergency
• hearts and minds
• middlebrow
• the exotic
• domestic tropes
• Asian nationalism

Acknowledgements

This article draws on the author’s work for her doctoral thesis, “Decolonisation and the Middlebrow Novel”. She would like to thank David Johnson and Alex Tickell for their guidance, and the anonymous Journal of Postcolonial Writing reviewers for comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The “minimal impact” hypothesis has been contested (see e.g. Ward 2001).

2. In this Special Issue, Alex Tickell studies Han’s use of middlebrow romance tropes in the context of this integrationist Cold War orientalism.

3. Likewise, for the Singaporean author Chin (1961), the jungle is both the locale of communist anti-colonial resistance and a political metaphor.

4. Tickell (2019) detects a modernist influence in Han’s descriptions of the “nightmarish ironies of the conflict” (434), suggesting a further link with western literature.

5. This description is reminiscent of E.M. Forster’s ([1924] 2005) A Passage to India and George Orwell’s ([1934] 2009) Burmese Days. Anthony Burgess’s Time for a Tiger features similar scenes of squalor. The first volume of The Malayan Trilogy (Burgess 2000), it was published in October 1956; that is, after Han’s and McMinnies’s novels.

6. For example, readers are likely to have related the exotic to W. Somerset Maugham’s Far Eastern stories. Han herself refers to Malayan writing “in the Somerset Maugham tradition” as comprising books “about white people who happen to be in Malaya” (1957, 21). See also Ina Zhang’s article in this Special Issue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Wetherilt

Anne Wetherilt is a PhD student at the Open University. Her thesis examines the work of British women writers, their fictional response to decolonization, and their location in the broader context of post-war middlebrow fiction.