STORIES OF REBILLION
A Review of Claire Tham's Saving The Rainforest
Kelvin Ha
Rating: *** out of *****.
Publisher: Times Books International. 1993.
Claire Tham's Saving the Rainforest can be purchased on-line from The Singapore Bookshop.If you have read Claire Tham's previous collection of short stories, Fascist Rock, you would have found that the characters in those stories were all rebelling against something, and it was usually the parental figure in the all it's various guises of authority. In this later collection, she explores pretty much the same themes: Rebellion against social convention, expectations, family obligations etc. In short, there is very much a repetition of the rebellion against the parental authority which lurks behind everything her characters are rebelling against.
However, this time around, Claire Tham has endowed rebellion with a sort of unique attraction. In "The Forerunner", one of the stories in this collection, she describes through the eyes of a younger brother the rebellion of the older one against his parents and how it eventually led to his death. There is a certain admiration of the elder brother's spirit which the younger boy admires, a spirit that can only be tamed by death. However, his elder brother's lifestyle is not something that the narrator would like to try for himself as it involved everything that he was brought up to turn his back on, in particular, drug consumption.As deadly as it may seem, rebellion offers the characters a real chance to find themselves and express who they really are. It acts as a form of psychosis for the repressed characters. For example, in "Saving the Rainforest", an unmarried woman approaching middle age has an affair with her best friend's 19 year old son. As much as their relationship puts her at odds with society and her friend, she finds a sense of freedom and being alive which she had thus far repressed in order to build a good career and life for herself. This, however, would not be doing justice to the story as it is far more complex than that.
Easily the best story in the collection, "Saving the Rainforest" is also an ironic demonstration of the fact that young rebels grow up to be staunch supporters of the very society they were going against. The narrator's best friend, whose teenage son she is having an affair with, was herself a rebel in her youth who had indulged in promiscuous sex and drugs in her time. Now in middle age, she frowns upon the very things she had done when she was young, and this puts her at odds with the narrator.
Desire is also one of the agents responsible for rebellion in Tham's book. In "Contingencies", Kok Cheong, the protagonist, is strongly attracted to his friend Tom's fiancee. This of course leads to the usual love triangle, which in itself, is a deviation from accepted social norms which forbid one to desire another's partner. But, once again, the story shows that in rebelling against the order, one is being true to one's self.
Because all the stories revolve ostensibly around the topic of rebellion, they all invariably end up sounding the same. This is a shame as Tham has demonstrated that she has the ability to carry on with certain of her stories. Saving the Rain Forest is ample testimony to her talents, and she should have no trouble turning some of the stories in it into full length novels.
Kelvin Ha operates a tow truck company and is currently working on a novel.
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