Name: The black isle
ISBN: 9780446563925

Sandi Tan

Leaving Shanghai for the Black Isle with her father and twin brother as World War II looms, Cassandra begins seeing ghosts all over the seaport town and attracts the attention of a dangerous, but charismatic man.

The black isle

4.5 to be petty, because did we really need the incest and octopus sex? But otherwise a dark, sweeping epic of a novel in a Singapore that's both thinly veiled and slightly contorted, fittingly. A speculative history without naming all the names, that hits all the major touchstones.

Black Isle

Emmett

This has become especially close to my heart; for the first time I'm reading something about home that isn't straightforwardly appraising, reactionary or recitative. It is first and foremost story, an enchanting tale that is imaginative and historical. It is plot and details first before it is anything else.

Its delicate balance of the real and unreal is its true spark - each to the other is meat and bone. The magical realism, characters and ghosts are fictional, but context gives them a map to move in, while the fictional becomes the experiential conduit by which (belated) history becomes vividly and bloodily solid. The war-torn terrain is transformed into a landscape of agony and humiliation. In Tan's hands the dirty island becomes an evocative, glorious, weighted thing - with its lingering past, unspeakable trauma, the violence begotten in the historical and symbolic attempt to forget and refurnish, the darkness and light of human nature. The use of magic, I think, is not for its own sake, but it is meaningful in its resonance. For an island whose geographical space is a constant renovation, and whose history is continually rewritten and overwritten, the supernatural is an assertive force, a reminder of something that can melt out of memory but not existence - a kind of Banksyian resistance. A hazy, stubborn third world between the past and the present.

The schooled reader who is familiar with the Isle, too, sees between worlds. The strange and the familiar collide for one in the know, producing wonder, pleasure. One of the delights of reading this is the fact that though the Black Isle is unnamed, the text provides identifiable signs - Robinsons department stores, Peranakans, the British East India Company, Emerald Hill. As a present citizen of this isle I have picked up these signs like little charms. The reader familiar with English literary canon, which seems so alien to this landscape, will be sensitive to the oddness of cultural clutter - Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is mentioned once; a young Shanghainese girl reads Baudelaire by moonlight in an old colonial mansion. The oddness is all too familiar, and adds an excellent touch.

Nothing ever written about the 'Black Isle' has ever been this sweeping, this sensitive, or this alive.

The black isle

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