Leaving the Heart Behind by Joan Foo Mahony JF Publishing HK$158
I'll say this for Joan Foo Mahony's Leaving the Heart Behind: it does get better. However, you'll need patience to find this out.
This debut novel is about brother and sister Mako and Kimiko Koyama, who are sent to Malaya in 1936 when the former is asked to become a spy, and how their lives become intertwined with the Lims, a leading George Town family, before being rent apart by war.
It's a pretty successful attempt to tell the story of the tumultuous events in Japan and Malaya in the middle years of the last century through a twisty-turny family history. And as a textbook on elements of 20th-century history, it isn't at all bad. The problem is that, especially in its first half, it's sometimes written like one.
For example, bits of information keep getting dropped into lines of speech in ways that people just don't talk. 'All this is too soon,' says Kimiko at one point, for example. 'I need to think about how to approach my conservative parents.' Sorry - 'my conservative parents'? This is clunkily expository dialogue.
Mahony also has a tendency to repeat herself, and to drum information home like she's teaching a class of five-year-olds. 'He brought in small-budget Chinese- and Indian-language movies from China and India. His customer base comprised Indian estate workers and Chinese tin miners.' Sorry, where did everything come from again?
