Colonial Atoms

Not guns but confidence governs an empire. People must trust their rulers to have the power they proclaim with such ease and eloquence. We must believe that behind the walls of the barracks there are tanks (not rusted watering cans). Raise a hand against the ruling class, and you know that hand will be cut off. But what if it there is nothing behind those walls? What if all façade? J.G. Farrell, The Singapore Grip. When the rulers run out of electricity to light the show.

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Our author places a bomb under Bernard Mandeville, blowing him sky-high. Private vices produce private vices; no public virtue grows out of rotten seed. The colony is attacked. Yet soldiers are working at the docks, the local population having refused to perform the civilian tasks - this during an invasion. Put it down to anti-British resentment, though many of the Chinese will suffer terribly if the Japanese conquer this territory…. I must stop you there, friend: we shouldn’t be carried away by our post-colonial prejudices. In truth, this is an outsider’s view; something to put on an academic’s CV, where ‘radicalism’ is advertised like Marmite. The times were not so simple. Colonies succeed through the support of its native population, while they are often destroyed by the ruling elite. In every society, it is the rulers we need to look at. Monty Blackett, son of a Singapore merchant patriarch, is trying to sneak out off the island with the Da Sousa Sisters, whom he hopes to bed during the voyage out. His own safety is what matters; the civilisation that has cultivated his privilege can sink to the bottom of History’s sea. His father little better. Even as war threatens he is organising the carnival celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the firm. Better spend his time in digging trenches to defend his assets? The thought! There is no world outside his local milieu, an atoll of fantasy in an ocean of nasty facts.

In this extraordinary novel, what we find, and it happens again and again, is the complacency of a society unable to conceive that its privileged existence will end. It’s not just their wealth that insulates this ruling class from the Japanese threat; a colonial relationship, with its distance from the local population, has elevated them above all mundane concerns. The locals, though everywhere, are invisible: they are silent servants who serve at tables and drive their cars; or the street populace, ubiquitous, and thus unnoticed, as trees. As such they can offer no traction against which a colonial experiences the friction of the real; thus judge where they are weak, are failing. These natives scenery. The same view attaches to the Japanese, even though they have intruded onto Walter’s merchant paradise - over the last twenty years they have proved efficient competitors. The locals not visible, the Europeans feel untouchable: on a mountain top there is nobody to see but one’s self. Of course this breeds an instinctive superiority, from which follows this fallacy: their wealth, position and power cannot possibly be undone by a few Asiatics. It is not really racism, of which there is little in the novel; indeed, individual dealings with servants and employees are civilised and intelligent. Rather, it is the mentality of a ruling class that doesn’t see its subjects as equals. On top of a mountain easy to think yourself taller than everybody else. For an aristocracy, the artisans and peasants (and the middle classes) are simply part of the environment, to be used as and when a need arises. In a colony such indifference is more marked. Less people than levers, cogs and wheels, the natives exist to serve the great merchant machine. Race adds a further layer of detachment between the plutocracy and these locals; class coming close to caste. Surrounded by a multi-cultural society, these Brits rarely think about the Malay and the Chinese. Not so much humans than an aspect of geography. How can an environment overturn us? Then that fabulous wealth. On the island of Singapore the enormous houses with their palatial grounds create their own islands, where even the town they occupy feels a continent away. Respond to a crisis? Only when the bombs are landing in the garden.

He scratched his head and set off in search of spectacles, but it was some time before he managed to find them: Cheong, afraid that he might damage them in his delirium, had removed them to a place of safety. He crammed them on and hurried back to the window just in time to see the girl (Vera! Good gracious! Naked!) at last succeed in bringing her shoulders above the bar. She steadied herself there for a moment, recovering from the effort she had made. In the early light her skin shone greenish-white against the dark foliage around her.

Matthew now realised that he was not the only spectator of this scene, for an elderly orang-utan with elaborate mutton-chop whiskers lay sprawled in a rubber tree on the edge of the glade watching the girl’s gymnastics. And while it watched her it distractedly ate an apple, holding it up from time to time for inspection and meanwhile drumming absent-mindedly with the fingers of its other hand on its pale, bulging paunch. 

In an exotic country, with its clashes of culture and technology, the surreal surfaces like salmon out of a river. No need for Breton and Max Ernst, the jungle the great artist here. The simple juxtapositions of daily existence create their own strange spectacles. Then there is the bizarrerie of empire. The merchant patriarchs, being closer to gods than men, it is quite natural that when one of the greatest merchants dies he should be embalmed. There is something Pharaonic about this place. With the British Empire behind you a rich man lives more like a king than a businessman. Another crossroad where the strange and the commonplace meet. War to add new levels of surrealism. The ordinary made exotic by geography is turned uncanny by falling bombs. Langfield’s mummy is laid out on the boardroom table as the Japanese rush through the army’s last defences. Ludicrous. Protected for so long inside their wealthy cocoon - of money, of race, of caste - they cannot imagine anything interfering with the ritual round of their normal duties. Running to a boat to escape the enemy an executive carries Langfield on his back….

This complacency is revealed in various ways. The poorly organised defences of the army, and its limited resources, due to lack of preparation. This decides matters. However, we can’t put it all down to a Whitehall that is prepared to sacrifice the minor colonies for the home country. By now, the idea of the Empire is greater than its paltry details. The reason colonial duties are not taken seriously. Imperial Britain has become an habit; requiring little endeavour, it is believed a perpetual motion machine, that running itself will protect them forever. Oh, we pay our taxes…the usual carp of a bourgeois, who treats money as they do their own blood. Yet money alone cannot keep a political system intact. It requires the energies of its believers, their daily acts of devotion and service. Our characters are too comfortable for that. The Empire simply a life insurance scheme. Such an attitude drains the enterprise of spirit, and when the crunch comes such characters will not sacrifice themselves to save it. They resent the army. Have no interest in the airforce. Indeed the soldiers and airmen are treated as servants: their job to clean up after the Japs have messed the house…. Walter goes on about the spirit of the age. It never dawns on him that for his wealth to survive he must also have a spirit of place. Lacking such a spirit these people ensure Singapore will fall. When defeat becomes obvious, Walter considers trading with the Japanese. It is not only commitment to the Empire he lacks, he is ignorant of this new world, the power of the enemy, their pride, with its lust for revenge.

It was the development of Singapore as a great naval and military base which had started the rot. People who had no real connection with the country had flooded in. The Military had their uses, he went on, forgetting that the Major himself had been a military man in his day, but they were nomads, here today and gone tomorrow, never bothering to get to know the people or the country. What was the result of this influx? Simply that the old feeling of space and tranquillity which used to make Singapore such a pleasant place to live in had gone, and gone for ever.

‘Sylvia and I used to motor thirty or forty miles sometimes in our pyjamas to have supper with friends in Johore. That’s what I call a comfortable way to live!’

And the Major, though he would have preferred to discuss Japan’s increasingly threatening attitude in the sphere of international politics, was obliged to confess that going to a dinner-party in pyjamas did sound to him the very model of a life of contentment: obviously in those days there was no risk of meeting maddened hordes of strikers waving parangs.

Matthew is another one. Sent to progressive schools, this young man has turned out a nincompoop; a foolish idealist, who prefers to spout the nonsense of peace and human harmony at a time of revolution, war and extermination. Clever enough to understand the political realm he is not clever enough to realise that it cannot be changed by lovely ideas alone. A priest preaches the Gospels on a battlefield. Unaware that the various organisations to which he belonged - promoting peace and the League of Nations - were little more than jollies for its members, a chance to continue the elite civilities of the older aristocratic realm, he refuses to learn from experience, preferring the intoxication of his own virtue. Just like Walter and his carnival, Matthew turns away from the realities of life, his floats big ideas and intellectual fairy tales. Only a fool, surely, to think of cordial co-existence between greedy empires? Like a naive Christian he doesn't realise that Christ was never meant to rule on earth.

Can such innocence, the product of peace, its own special blend of selfishness, survive the life and death struggles of war?

Matthew and Vera said goodbye to Dupigny and they wished each other luck. They shook hands. Matthew and Vera crossed the gang-plank followed by Williams. Dupigny waited to help then cast off and was just stooping to do so when a powerful beam sprang out of the darkness and played over the launch, then fastened on Dupigny. The figures on the deck froze. The Australian corporal who was holding the lamp switched it on. It illuminated a ragged party of solders wearing Australian hats. One of them had a revolver, another a tommy-gun. There were about a dozen of them.

‘Sorry, sports, we’re taking the boat,’ the man with the torch on Dupigny said. ‘Hop it.’

We were looking forward to a happy ending, to rise phoenix-like out of the fires of burning Singapore. No, it cannot to be. This city, like the empire, is a collection of disparate and conflicting groups. There is no unity. Jealous of Vera, and hating Matthew, Joan Blackett refuses to help Vera on to the last ship. But they find a boat! Alas, this miraculous lifeline is taken away by soldiers who, all decencies overboard, are thinking only of themselves. A scrum for survival in desperate times; an entire civilisation collapses when it is every man and woman for themselves. The British Empire a paper dragon that requires only one match to reduce it to smoke. No tanks. Few planes. An army of poorly trained amateurs. Then those civilians…they refuse to volunteer, even though defeat will wipe out their existence. This empire was not made for war. It depends on peace, like an addict on junk. Take away that drug….

Review: The Singapore Grip