I refer to the report ‘Malay integration: MM stands corrected,’ (The Straits Times, Tuesday March 8, 2011)

As a long-time observer of the extraordinary impact that MM has on the Singapore political scene, I would like to comment on his change of position with regard to the failure of the Malay community to integrate with the rest of the society.

The shift bears all the marks of a constrained rather than a spontaneous change of mind and heart. Firstly, the terse statement ‘I stand corrected’ is far short of a genuine apology and may even exacerbate rather than assuage hurt feelings. Secondly, the explanation of an oversight of the community’s successful efforts at integration in the last 2 years, is unconvincing, given MM’s sharp, meticulous thinking and observation. Thirdly, the statement, coming so long after the comments (first reported in the Straits Times on 3 January, 2011) and presumably very soon before the coming general elections, smacks of an opportunistic move.

It is tempting to conclude that this reversal of position is a consensus decision of the PAP government, rather than a conviction decision by MM himself.

Singaporeans like myself, who admire MM for the boldness of his convictions even if we disagree with them, would have preferred to see him maintain his unique role of telling hard truths and taking responsibility for them, rather than give the impression of taking a position so at odds with his strong personality and forthright style.

That way, we are not confused by the sending out of mixed signals.

I refer to the review of Catherine Lim’s book, Miss Seetoh In The World.

I have always thought that it was my “fault” for not being an enthusiastic supporter of one of Singapore’s most popular writers.

After reading your comments, I began to un- derstand where the fault lies. I agree with you that Lim’s writing is “competent and grammatical, if… mechanical”.

— Michael Yap Guan Kim

Truth be told, Catherine Lim’s writing has been on the decline, starting with Unhurried Thoughts At My Funeral in 2005.

It was obvious that she was simply filling up the pages and throwing chunks of stuff into the book indiscriminately, never mind that they were not related to the book.

— Deborah Hsu

After reading the review and the two readers’ letters published in LifeStyle and Life!, I find myself feeling a little sorry for Catherine Lim.

Whatever the perceived literary quality of Miss Seetoh In The World, Lim deserves more courteous and more carefully considered responses from both reviewer and readers.

I also beg to differ with Ms Akshita Nanda’s later reply to Lim’s claim that Ms Nanda had failed to address the ‘political theme’ in Miss Seetoh.

From the beginning, Miss Seetoh is shot through with politics, starting with brief, seemingly playful, allusions to Shakespeare’s republican tragedy Julius Caesar, and continuing with Maria Seetoh’s head on collisions with and reflections on national policies and issues including social engineering (of which Seetoh’s disastrous marriage to the malevolent toady Bernard seems a result), local school classroom and staffroom culture, the teaching of English Language (big L) and literature (small l), censorship, the 5 Cs, Singlish, social inequality and injustice, and domestic surveillance.

But perhaps most telling is Lim’s representation of the life and death of the prophetic figure V.P. Pandy, clearly a portrait and an elegy for the late former Worker’s Party of Singapore Member of Parliament for Anson, J.B. Jeyaretnam.

Ms Nanda asserts that Lim fails to develop these political engagements beyond ‘observations’.

Perhaps, but Lim’s representation of the newly politically engaged Seetoh as little more than a spectator of (and grumbler at) political events in Singapore can be construed as an understandable strategy. In 1994, a series of articles by Lim published in The Straits Times critical of government policy provoked a very public, sharp retort.

Ms Nanda writes that she finds Lim’s satirical style ‘grating, having never been fond of the coy invention 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 counterpoints.

However, writers such as Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens were obliged to similarly mediate their critiques of society in Gulliver’s Travels and Little Dorrit.

I am disappointed by Ms Nanda’s failure to acknowledge and respond to Lim’s first overt and sustained fictional engagement with Singaporean politics and political issues.

Ms Nanda’s glossing over of these issues may mean Lim has been unsuccessful in this experiment. Conversely, the same evidence may also suggest that Lim has been all too successful. Little Dorrit it is not. However, I humbly urge readers to read Lim’s hot mess of a novel and judge for themselves.

— Angus Whitehead

Dear Sir/Madam

I refer to Ms Akshita Nanda’s review of my novel ‘Miss Seetoh in the World’ in the Sunday Times, 27 February, 2011.

I would like to comment that while the review was very detailed, analytical and competent, it was incomplete, because it made hardly any reference to the political theme in the novel. The omission was surprising because:

1. it was the first time, in my 30 years as writer, that I had written a political novel
2. the political theme was a major component in the novel, setting its tone and direction right from the beginning
3. Singaporean readers would have been most interested in the reviewer’s analysis or criticism of it.

I would appreciate very much if Ms Nanda could explain this rather glaring omission.

Sincerely,

Dr Catherine Lim

Dear Dr Lim,

Thank you for your feedback. To address your query, my review of Miss Seetoh In The World did refer to the novel’s description of political conditions in Singapore. I’m afraid that I did not and do not think the political themes needed further discussion, or even that they set the tone and direction of the story.

From the very first chapter, the strongest engine driving the novel is Miss Maria Seetoh and her evolution, which is what the review explored.

Thank you for writing in.

Best wishes,

Akshita

Dear Ms Nanda

I was hoping you would see that the evolution of Maria Seetoh was very closely linked with the political conditions in Singapore, in particular her relationship with the opposition member through the various reverses of his career, the political nature of the novel’s climactic incident, and the very note on which it ended. Therefore I do not agree that the political theme deserved the very scant attention you gave it. However, I respect your position as a reviewer to stand by your explanation.

Sincerely

Catherine Lim

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.