‘All good characters should surprise their creators’ – Tash Aw talks to Sarah O’Reilly

This month is the paperback publication of Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World. In the following interview with Sarah O’ Reilly he talks about Malasia, mythology, and why he doesn’t consider himself an ‘historical’ novelist…

You were born in Malaysia, and now live in London. Where is home for you and why?

Malaysia is still my point of reference; I compare everything to it – ways of living, thinking, being. It’s where my family still live, and the emotional ties that this creates are impossible to escape. When anything happens there – a natural disaster, for example, or political turmoil, I feel it keenly. But the physical reality is that I am in London more than I am in any other place. I travel a lot, often spending long periods in other countries – France, for example, or China – but London is where I own a flat, and property ownership really ties you to a place. London is a place where I have my books, a few mugs, a table and a couple of pictures; it’s where I pay taxes and do my washing. The boring daily things create a sense of home, I guess. And above all, London is full of people like me, who have come here from other places, so it’s easy to blend in.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A musician or a vet.

What, or who, made you a novelist?

It’s impossible for most novelists to say how they chose their profession – mostly because one just falls into it. There wasn’t a writerly figure in my family or education, no defined source of inspiration. But I grew up in an environment where books and stories were valued, and, because we moved around a lot in my early years, there was always a sense that novels were constant, whereas one’s habitat wasn’t. Being a novelist is such a tenuous thing – there isn’t a career path, no progression to follow. One can only keep writing and hope that it continues for as long as possible.

Map of the Invisible World is your second novel to be set in Southeast Asia. Does living in England enable, or inhibit, your ability to write about the area?

Without doubt, living in England enables me to write more clearly about Southeast Asia. Different writers work in different ways, but I need a certain amount of physical separation from my subject before I am able to render it with clarity and objectivity.

Both of your novels have been set in the recent past. Would you describe yourself as an historical novelist?

I’m definitely not an ‘historical’ novelist. Part of what I try to do is to update the notion of the Southeast Asian novel and ideas of history. I think it’s unhelpful to see novels in terms of ‘history’ or ‘contemporary’ – everything depends on the treatment of a novel.

In my case, I’ve been drawn to Southeast Asia in times of great change and upheaval – I’m interested in our recent past, how we have come to be what we are now, and what we might become. The 1940s and 1960s – which straddle the process of Independence – were extremely traumatic times which set the tone for today’s politics and society, so they have a direct bearing on the way we live now. We’re still trying to work out what happened. So my work doesn’t involve a dusty costume drama – it’s about looking at the way Southeast Asia has changed and is changing.

You’ve said that the character of Margaret is based upon Judith Sihombing. Can you tell me about her and how you came to know each other?  And is Margaret’s example typical of the way in which you find or create your characters?

Margaret isn’t based on Judith as such, though the stories that Judith told me about her life in Jakarta in the 60s helped form the idea of a character like Margaret. I’ve known Judith for years because she’s the mother of one of my best friends, but I hadn’t known about her times in Indonesia in the 60s until I came to write Map of the Invisible World.  This really isn’t typical of the way I write characters – I don’t like characters who are cardboard cutouts of real people, and the challenge for me was to use Judith’s inspirational stories to create a convincing character who wasn’t her.

Din wants to write a ‘secret history’ of the Indonesian islands east of Bali, a ‘lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners’.  What sort of a relationship do you feel you have with the country in which your narrative is set? Did you feel, at times, like a foreigner to it?

Yes, absolutely. But I often feel like a foreigner in virtually every country I’m in – even, at times, in England or Malaysia – so that’s not unusual!

Din’s project is a way of reclaiming his past. There’s a bit in the novel where he rails against the ignorance of young people who don’t know where they’ve come from, historically speaking – because in modern Southeast Asia, there’s often a blithe ignorance of modern history, which is often associated with hardship and humiliation. Colonial history isn’t ‘our’ history so it’s best not to celebrate it, so the thinking goes. Din wants to go beyond the formal recording of history by Westerners and look at folk history – he’s a dreamer, an idealist.

Margaret is an expert in non-verbal communication, claiming to understand the motives behind expression and gesture. As a novelist, are you in the same position? If so, how well do you understand your own characters and the actions they take?

I try to understand my characters as fully as possible – I’m in control, after all. But all good characters should surprise their creators; they have to take on a life of their own. There’s always a moment in the writing of a novel when it feels right to have your characters do things that you had not planned at the outset – and that’s when you know that you have a novel, not just a series of ideas.

Do you see yourself as a political writer?

No, I don’t, but it’s impossible to be a modern Southeast Asian writer without being aware of politics, and the way they impact on every aspect of society, so there’s always going to be a political element to my work.

Margaret thinks, about Indonesia, that ‘in this country you had to surrender to myths, to the uncertainty of stories, to the failure of logic’. How much of an inspiration are the places in which your stories are set?

A sense of place and the specifics of culture are hugely important to my novels. In Map of the Invisible World, for example, mythology and the appreciation of spirituality that exist in Java become key characters – the feeling that life is essentially uncontrollable (an anathema to a person like Margaret) becomes stronger as the novel goes on. People in Southeast Asia do attribute more importance to that which lies outside the empirical than people do in the West – but often, as is the case with Margaret – the ‘supernatural’ is merely a way to explain things that don’t work.

How did writing this book change you, if at all?

It changed me in too many ways to describe in the space of a short interview!

Why did you choose to end the novel with Johan setting off on a journey?

Because his life is a journey without end, a terrible circular thing without closure. Whereas Adam, Din, Margaret and Karl have all suffered in their own way, their lives have a path that will lead to some kind of conclusion, whether happy or sad. Johan is caught in an awful cycle of non-resolution, a life in which the only relief from pain comes from being in constant movement. So I wanted to end with him being in motion, wanting to seek an end but not certain that he will find it – and we are not sure where his journey will end, or how.

What are you working on at the moment?

A novel set in 2008. But I can’t really say more than that at the moment.