Published in 2019, this is by Yangsze Choo, a Malaysian-born novelist, who now lives in California. Her family moved around a lot in her youth, on account of her diplomat father's career. Constantly the new kid, always the foreigner looking in, she learned to observe closely and to embrace the new. But the impressions from her early childhood still retain a strong hold on her, and as her parents have returned to Kuala Lumpur, she visits every year, often researching her novels at the same time.

The Night Tiger takes us to the Malaya of 1931 -- more specifically to the area around Taiping and Batu Gajah and Ipoh, which we know reasonably well. The descriptions very effectively evoke the lushness of the Malaysian countryside, and those charmed hours of the tropical day (dawn and the hours after sunset).


AWESOME cover!

The chapters alternate between the first-person accounts of Ji Lin (a trainee seamstress, who is also a part-time taxi-dancer, because she needs to help her mother pay off her mahjong debts), and third-person accounts that follow Ren, an orphaned "houseboy" who is about to move from the service of one colonial medical practitioner (Dr MacFarlane, now deceased) to that of another (the moody Dr William Acton, who seems constantly torn between dark and light).

Before he leaves this world, Dr MacFarlane commissions Ren to find his amputated finger, and reunite it with the rest of his body, because only if he is buried intact will his soul be at peace. And there's a time limit for this kind of thing: 49 days.

Ji Lin, meanwhile, has accidentally come into possession of a finger, and wants to restore it to its rightful owner (a task made harder when the person who inadvertently passed it to her turns up dead shortly afterwards).

Will the seeker and the keeper find each other in time? This is the question that drives the plot, and it very effectively keeps you reading.


Taiping, 2012

But there are additional complications. Ji Lin's step-brother is Shin. Ren's dead twin brother is Yi. And Dr Acton's Chinese name contains the character Li. This connection makes them "part of a set", mystically tied together because their names form the five Confucian virtues. As Ji Lin says, "I had the odd fancy that the five of us were yoked by some mysterious fate. Drawn together, yet unable to break free, the tension made a twisted pattern." Later, she reiterates this idea: "I imagined the five of us making a pattern. A set that fit together naturally like the fingers on a hand. The further we strayed, the more the balance in our worlds distorted. Less human, more monstrous."

Ren means benevolence, and this little boy (hardly into double figures) really does epitomize this characteristic. But the others -- Yi representing righteousness, Ji wisdom, Shin faithfulness, and Li ritual or order -- well, not so much...

The Li element in particular seems to be running amok. "Without Li," as another of the doctors recalls of his Confucian reading, "what is there to distinguish men from beasts?" The dead twin, Yi, who regularly makes an appearance in Ji Lin's dreams, even before she knows who he is, maintains: "It's all a problem with the order -- the way things are being bent and rearranged. The further each of us strays, the more everything warps." For Dr Acton: "It's the fickleness of events that frightens him, as though he only has to say, 'I wish it weren't so!' and the pattern reorders to suit him. Like a dark fairy tale, where all your wishes, however evil and stupid, are granted."

And just to make things more complicated, there's another contender for representative of the quintet's Li element, just to keep us guessing...

So, our story incorporates ghosts, grave-tampering, clairvoyance, dreams that act as channels to the spirit world, and people with an uncanny ability to affect destiny...


"We took a trishaw to the Anglican graveyard at All Saints' Church..."



All this unfolds in a nicely creepy manner. Ji Lin's recurring dreams, for example, chillingly evoke the railway that carries away dead souls, and the dead little boy who lingers in this half-world waiting for his brother: "Dusk was falling, a blue hush, and crowds of silent, wraithlike figures were rushing here and there... The people themselves were indistinct. If I stared hard, they dissolved like smoke, but as soon as I glanced away they were back... A spare old man -- a foreigner with light eyes and a grey, scrubby beard -- made his way across the platform. The edges of the dark suit he wore seemed to fray and blur as though it was unravelling into the falling dusk." I'm not a fan of dream sequences as plot movers, but here -- brief and eerie -- they worked very well.

And as if all this were not enough, we have weretigers...

"The weretiger," we're told, "is not a man, but a beast who, when he chooses, puts on a human skin and comes from the jungle into the village to prey on humans." From the notes at the end we learn: "Spirit tigers appear in all sorts of guises... Shape-shifters, in particular, embody the tension between man and his beast nature. In most tales, the tiger acts in ways that people should not, expressing hidden or forbidden desires."

One of our characters is suspected of being a weretiger, but as with all the supernatural elements, the door is cleverly left open for alternative, more conventional explanations.

Malaysia -- indeed much of Southeast Asia -- is saturated with tales of ghosts and uncanny occurrences. I've learned to be agnostic. Just because I haven't experienced something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and I've certainly talked to many people for whom this shadowy otherworld is very real indeed.



In amongst all this action, there is a bit of social commentary, mostly reflecting on the position of women in 1930s Malaya. We're not surprised to find that it's not good... "Dancehall girls" are looked down on, and equated with sex workers; Ji Lin's mother is subjected to violence by an overbearing second husband; trainee nurses are supposed to live like nuns, or risk losing their positions; local women are preyed on by colonials; and even nice guys can be terribly pushy... By the end, Ji Lin looks as though she might have the chance to break out, but we're not putting any money on it...

My only criticism is a minor one, and its cause is probably fidgety publishers who can't bear to leave their readers in doubt about anything. I'm talking about over-explanation. For example, at one point Choo mentions "thick slices of Hainanese white bread, toasted over charcoal and spread with butter and kaya". That's enough, right? If you don't know what kaya is, you have enough here to make an educated guess, and if you really want specifics, you can Google it. Instead, the sentence proceeds: "... and kaya, a caramelized custard made from eggs, sugar, and coconut milk". I mean, that's not even accurate... Kaya isn't a custard, it's a spread... And this definitional approach disrupts the flow of the narrative. This doesn't happen enough to be a real irritation, but it's one of my pet hates. Readers should be prepared to not have everything handed to them on a plate...

All in all, then, a great light read. This was another of our "both-read" books, and we both whizzed through it very happily. Highly atmospheric, gripping, and twisty, with an ending that ties things up, but also leaves scope for a sequel -- I'd go along with Patricia Schultheis in calling it "a bravura performance".