The Ghastly and the Ghostly

My starting point is a small but haunting moment in J.G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip (1978), an image which, though insignificant from the point of view of the plot, stands out from the page. Matthew Webb, the plump, owlish, idealist son of Old Webb, has just arrived in Singapore, at the behest of Walter Blackett, his father’s old partner. He is taken to the (misnamed, decrepit) Mayfair Building, ‘a vast and rambling bungalow built on a score of fat, square pillars’, where Matthew’s father has spent many of the last years of his life in the company of the beautiful Vera Chaing. Matthew is taken round the side of the building: ‘Here he glimpsed a tennis court, disused, from whose baked mud surface giant thistles had grown up and now waited like silent skeleton players in the gloom.’1 The richness of this image is linked to its ambiguity. This is a grotesquely comic moment, worthy of Dickens, and it is also a profoundly uncanny moment. Rude natural growth forms a parodic metaphor for the British imperial culture that has already substantially vanished, whose decay is personified, with reversed anthropomorphic shock, as ‘silent skeleton players in the gloom’, waiting for the last trump, or, bathetically, for the game to begin, for someone to serve

Art · Art history · Comics · Gloom · Literature · Metaphor · Theology · Trilogy · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

• Only a Light Wreath of The New-Fallen Snow

  Open Access•Paulina Ambroży•European Journal of American…•2023

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