Goh Poh Seng's old man goes about things rather differently. After riding around the Malaysian interior for a couple of days he lights on a small town that he considers just what he's looking for -- smaller than a city, yet not so small as to leave him with no choice of new friends.
Once there, he spends some days up in the hills, swimming in a river and sunning himself on a boulder. Back in town, where he's staying in a modest hotel, he gets to know a literary school teacher who quotes the most illustrious Chinese poets at ever greater length the more he drinks. (The novel's title is a quote from the poet Han Shan).
But then, gradually, decisions present themselves, and eventually get made. He marries again, starts up once more in business, and thinks about the education of his step-sons. He even has a fling on the side, fathering a child with a girl he meets on his mountain river bank. Essentially, though, he re-engages with the kind of life he had known before he walked out and left his family back home in Singapore.
The author's moral -- and these are the kind of books that have to have a moral -- is, by the end, nothing if not ambiguous. On the one hand, all the old man has discovered is that the instincts that led him to live one kind of life in Singapore have led him to lead exactly the same kind of life in provincial Malaysia. On the other, he still thinks there must be more to life than he has found.
What isn't clear, then, is whether Goh Poh Seng has written an ironic tale, showing that even rather unusual individuals are likely to repeat their patterns of behavior over and over again, or whether he himself quite simply hasn't found the answer to his question, and so couldn't finish his novel other than with a question mark.
That said, this is an excellent book. It reads extremely naturally. There's never a superfluous sentence, and the style is engaging and user-friendly. It's reminiscent of a short story by Chekhov -- it has the same gentleness, the same striking but unostentatious detail, and the same quiet humor. Perhaps it's no coincidence that both writers were medical men.
This, then, is a fine fable in an old tradition. It doesn't solve the problem it sets out to solve, but then it's unlikely that anyone who had come across that momentous answer would be content merely to sit down and write a novel.
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