Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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112 of 119 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A marvelously good book that I thoroughly recommend., 9 Jun 2007
Once I started reading The Gift of Rain I could not put down. For two days I was lost in the amazing world of the people of Malaya in a sad and terrible time in their history on the island of Penang off the west coast of what is now peninsular Malaysia. After putting the book down, the story haunted me so much that I read it a second time.
Let me say first of all that the Gift of Rain is a great, easy and thoroughly entertaining read from its very beginning when deep in the night an elderly Japanese lady brings a sword to the front door of an elderly man who has been trying for 50 years to come to terms with his terrible past.
Like so many great novels this book refuses to be categorized; it has elements of a historical novel, a coming of age story, a war novel, a treatise on martial arts. Martial arts go to the root of Asian philosophy: Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism are all in the book. Predestination versus free will is one of the book's most important themes. The protagonist Philip Hutton's character is shaped by his struggles at a time of war to balance his duty and his loyalty to his father, his family, his country and the enemy in the form of his beloved martial arts teacher, his sensei, Hayato Endo.
The narrative begins as a reflective and beautifully written coming of age story when the sixteen year old, half Chinese boy, Philip Hutton meets the enigmatic Japanese diplomat Endo-san, who becomes his martial arts master and starts him off on an incredibly exciting but unbearably sad voyage of conflict and self discovery.
When the Japanese invade Malaya the tone and style of the book change. The book turns into a fast moving war story. But war destroys and the war has devastating effects on the lives of all the complex main characters.
Tan Twan Eng has an uncanny ability to create atmosphere. He does this partly through an appeal to the reader's senses. And how he succeeds! All the senses are there. Touch, taste and sight. Sound: from the voice of Sutherland to the "mournful wails" of the erhu. Smell; from the smells of food, rooms, clothes, streets, rain, the sea to the fragrance of a lonely tree. For Tan Twan Eng fragrance fuses into a "pungent concoction that (enters) us and (lodges) itself in the memory of the heart".
It has become fashionable for reviewers (and academics) to require of modern works of literature that they move boundaries. Too often this results in writers resorting to all sorts of gimmicks to give the patina of a literary work to their writing. Tan Twan Eng uses no gimmicks. His is simply an exceptionally well written book. But he does move boundaries: he moves the boundaries of our hearts.
A marvelously good book that I thoroughly recommend.
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89 of 95 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profound and meaningful book, 4 Sep 2007
The Gift of Rain is a difficult book.
I come from a very Western background, and perhaps this is what makes the novel so difficult. In The Gift of Rain, we see a story of Philip Hutton, a child (becoming a young man) of mixed Chinese-English heritage growing up in a wealthy business family in Penang, Malaysia in the 1930s and 1940s. He is taken under the tutelage of Endo-san, a Japanese tenant of Philip's father.
Books from different cultures are invaluable for learning about our fellow man. But the culture of the far east has always been mysterious to me. That is, the culture of honour, promises, bravery, culture, ritual suicide and utter ruthlessness. The Gift of Rain considers these themes in great detail - particularly divided loyalty - and shows the consequence in conflicts of loyalty, but it did not make clear to me how the culture and the brutality could co-exist. Perhaps this is my mistake in looking for logical explanations that fit with my own culture, but I was left as mystified as when I started.
The novel itself falls into two halves - the first ion which Philip learns martial arts and culture from Endo-san, and the second half when Malaysia falls under Japanese occupation. The first half does drag somewhat, although an ardent fan of aikijutsu might disagree. But it (some of it, at least) is needed to set the scene for the second, rather more dramatic half. Here the pace picks up and the story twists and turns. The level of detailing gives a wonderful flavour of Penang at the time, although the jungle scenes lack some of the detailing that might have made it, too, come alive.
The characterization is good too, particularly in terms of the Japanese and Chinese characters. Philip's immediate family - father, sister and brother are not painted with quite so much depth and can appear somewhat functional. But the characters of Yeap, Kon, Endo, Goro and Hirosho are wonderful, even if we never quite understand what makes them tick.
The novel also asks profound questions of colonialism. What is it that makes British occupation of Malaysia acceptable but renders Japanese occupation so unacceptable? What loyalty should a coloniser offer to the colonised? What loyalty should the colonised offer to the coloniser? There are no easy answers, and as Philip tries to discover his own national identity and loyalty on the small scale, Malaysia as a whole faces the same problems.
This is a profound and meaningful book, drawn on a big scale and with real moments of beauty. But at times, it does feel a little overlong, and falls just slightly short of answering that big question - what exactly made the Japanese psyche exactly what it was.
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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Elegantly written story taking on big themes, 6 Sep 2007
The Gift of Rain is the story of young, motherless boy of Chinese-English heritage, living in colonial Malaysia around WWII.
Philip meets Endo, a Japanese diplomat, who takes him on as a student of Aikido, but also uses him.
The book deals with ideas about identity and cultural heritage, the nature of colonialism, destiny and free will, and moral contingencies. All big important issues, but it does so with a lightness of touch that makes this a fluid, enjoyable read.
All of the characters are placed in impossible situations; all of them act badly at one point or another and yet the reader doesn't lose sympathy. Neither are you overwhelmed with sentimentality.
This book was not quite 5 stars for me; although wonderfully ambitious, I felt some of the themes were not as fully explored as they might be (but maybe because I couldn't quite connect with the buddhist themes of reincarnation in such a bald way. Nevertheless, highly recommended.
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