The Straits Times has at last reviewed my latest novel ‘Miss Seetoh in the World’, and, oh dear, it’s the worst review in my 30 years as a writer. I certainly hope to do better with them the next time!

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Catherine Lim’s new novel lacks the challenging touch of her short story collection

In the largely forgettable Miss Seetoh In The World, one of the more memorable scenes has a teacher steering a hapless secondary school student past the pitfalls of the GCE O-level English paper, ensuring he secures a good result but not any actual proficiency in the language.

It is hard not to see parallels between that chapter and the book. Singapore writer Catherine Lim’s latest work supplies a protagonist and the requisite word count for a novel, and makes tired but popular jokes and token attempts at sensuality.

It follows a tested recipe that might ensure its success at local bookstores, failing, however, to achieve literary excellence.

The title and first chapter breathe promise, hinting at a potentially powerful, even explosive, tale of a newly widowed woman who has been freed from the pain of an unhappy marriage to find her place in the world.

In fact, the book is a circumlocutory narrative of separate vignettes linked by the rambling thoughts of the titular character, Miss Maria Seetoh, secondary school teacher and aspiring writer.

Her stifling wedded life and the death of her husband are exposited in cliches and ruminated over relentlessly in the first 200 pages: “Her marriage had become pure grotesquerie” or “When a woman married, it was not just to an individual but a whole community”, after which she suddenly takes second-place to a string of soap opera-like events involving star-crossed lovers or bitter political rivals.

Her observations of their triumphs and failures remain merely observations. They fail to be translated into epiphany or character evolution, leading to a disjointed reading experience and the jarring sense, at the end of the story, that the author has had a lot more fun than the reader.

Miss Seetoh has much in common with her creator, finding solace in the Botanic Gardens and enjoying, at various stages in her life, a fulfilling career as a teacher and an author.

The whiff of autobiography will titillate some readers and this reviewer certainly found it a sadly necessary distraction, for the fictional character is boring, never achieving self-actualisation, never quite convincing the reader of her passion either for writing or for the unsuitable men in her life.

Telling the reader is not the same as showing.

Her friends and associates are just as thinly developed: man-hungry single women and philandering older men fixat-ed on either matrimony or mating.

They may have careers and families but these take second-place to sexual exploits – or rather, talking about sex and reinforcing stereotypes of gender behaviour.

As characters, they seem to exist just to show Miss Seetoh’s superiority over the common herd and mirror the author’s dismal opinion of humanity.

They also bear frightening similarity to the inhabitants of Lim’s earlier works such as Or Else, The Lightning God And Other Stories (1980). Clearly, several years on, Singaporeans in the author’s world have not evolved much.

Perhaps these cardboard cut-outs are meant to be placeholders for snapshots of Singapore’s past and present.

Several milestones are referred to in the book, which is set in 1993, from prohibitions against using Singlish on stage to the frenzied fever of en-bloc property sales, but in another stunning example of squan- dered potential, these merely surface in the text rather than being used in an insightful manner.

To be fair, this book will satisfy some readers. The prose is competent and grammatical, if ultimately mechanical.

Take this description of Miss Seetoh’s literal disgust at married life: “She got up, rushed to the bathroom, closed the door and expelled her revulsion, which came out in a swift stream, into the toilet bowl. The bathroom, scene of so many private miseries, had become her most dependable room.”

Lim’s digs at political conditions and the media will probably make many laugh even if her jokes are recycled from earlier works.

I find the style grating, having never been fond of the coy reinvention of names – “Mr TPK our great Prime Minister” and “The National Times” – or recasting of incidents that local readers will immediately match to real-life counterparts.

The other problem is that I have read better work from Lim.

Great writing sings, it roars, scoring heart and brain as the writer creates new worlds with the companionship of words.

Lim came closest to this with her 1993 collection, A Woman’s Book Of Superlatives. Some of those stories were anti-climactic while others had too painfully simple a resolution, but the exploration of gender issues was emotionally honest and even challenging.

In Miss Seetoh In The World, however, it is hard to decide what the writer intends to achieve. There are clumsy attempts at a post-colonial comedy of manners and at heartland soap opera, but in the end, neither works.

The author needs to strike a comfortable balance between enticing overseas readers with the allure of the unusual and not alienating locals by exoticising familiar activities. Perhaps then her next work will actually be memorable.

If you like this, read: The author’s 1993 work, A Woman’s Book Of Superlatives, available as part of The Catherine Lim Collection (Marshall Cavendish International (Asia), $26.75, Books Kinokuniya). This short story collection is not for the faint-hearted as it explores the plight of women around the world, such as child brides sold to wealthy suitors and victims of domestic violence.

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The following commentary was first published in the Straits Times on February 12th, 2011.

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PRIME Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s reassurance of the Muslim community, upset by what they perceived to be disparaging remarks of them made by Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, was exactly as expected. It was calm, reassuring and generous in its praise of the community’s efforts in working with people of other races and religions to achieve an integrated and harmonious Singapore. There was nevertheless an almost surreal quality about the event, with a respectful, filial son having to dissociate his views from his father’s.

Indeed, the surreality might have provoked some to speculate that the Prime Minister’s statement was part of a shrewd strategy, in keeping with the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) hard-headed realism, to assign to MM Lee the task of delivering unpalatable but necessary truths.

But this is speculation that even the most determined conspiracy theorist will have to abandon. First, the Prime Minister’s statement was in part a response to a blunt question posed by a Malay-Muslim professional organisation: Did MM’s view that Muslims were the hardest community to integrate into society reflect the Government’s view?

Second, anyone who understands MM Lee’s personality would know that a man of such strong convictions, forthright style and unshakeable self-confidence would find subterfuge of any kind both unnecessary and contemptible.

Mr Lee Kuan Yew – in being able to freely speak his mind on a whole range of controversial issues that other ministers would handle with utmost care, in provoking strong reactions both at home and abroad that the other leaders later scramble to appease – plays a unique role in Singapore politics.

While the Prime Minister and his colleagues can afford to disregard the controversy created by MM’s strong convictions on such issues as graduate mothers producing superior offspring or homosexuals holding public office, they cannot afford to ignore his statements about a sensitive subject like religion. Hence – especially with a general election looming – they had to undertake an exercise in damage control on this issue, and project a consensus that was as far removed from MM’s view as was consistent with the high respect accorded him.

This special feature of the dynamics of politics in Singapore may be summarised in terms of the tension that can arise between the ‘Conviction Politician’ that MM is and the ‘Consensus Politicians’ that the rest of the PAP leaders have to be. The differences between these two kinds of politicians can be seen in the following areas:

Style: MM does not feel any need to soften his style in deference to people’s feelings, while the other PAP leaders have been making great efforts, over the years, to get rid of the old image of high-handedness, inflexibility and intolerance. They constantly speak of a people-oriented approach, of the ‘light’ touch in dealing with thorny issues.

Attitude towards the opposition: MM has freely expressed his contempt of some members of the opposition, speaking of them in demeaning terms that the other PAP leaders would not risk using for fear of provoking a backlash, especially on the Internet.

General election expectations: MM does not feel the need to adjust to the expectations of a changing electorate, being completely confident that Singaporeans will continue to vote in the PAP resoundingly. He believes the PAP will be voted out of power only if it became corrupt and incompetent – which it will not, so long as it follows the principles of honest and efficient leadership embodied in his model of governance.

The Prime Minister and his colleagues, on the other hand, are anxiously aware of the pitfalls of not meeting the expectations of a younger and more sophisticated electorate, energised with a growing confidence in its power to bring about change.

What does the present situation bode for a post-Lee Kuan Yew era? It is clear that once such a massive force is gone, the situation will be radically changed. MM Lee will probably be Singapore’s last Conviction Politician for three reasons.

First, the conditions that allowed him to be a Conviction Politician in the first place – the revolutionary Singapore of more than half a century ago – have passed into history and can never be replicated.

Second, it is unlikely that any PAP leader after MM Lee will be able to match him in the scale and brilliance of his achievements. Hence no future leader will enjoy the degree of respect, goodwill and gratitude that he elicits, resulting in people readily overlooking whatever flaws of personality or style he might be perceived to have.

Third, as Singapore becomes more connected to an increasingly complex globalised world and its leaders face daunting, unexpected challenges, they will have no choice but to sacrifice individual convictions for team consensus, in order to project an image of unity, stability and strength, both to their own people and the rest of the world. The ‘Conviction Politician’ in the mould of Mr Lee Kuan Yew will become an unaffordable luxury, an anomaly and an anachronism.

There will be three camps of thought among Singaporeans in the post-MM era, each strongly differentiated from the other: Those who would welcome the departure of a political giant who had grown too powerful to allow Singapore politics to come into its own; those who would regret that his legacy was diminished insofar as he did not become the benign, inspirational, retired statesman like, say, Nelson Mandela; and those who would bemoan the passing of a unique man who, in showing conviction in the purest sense of the word, exemplified real leadership.

The writer is a Singaporean novelist.

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