This short novel is centered round what may be life's most fundamental question. Given that we only have a certain number of years to live, how should we best spend our time?
Philosophers have looked at this question with surprising infrequency. Perhaps they were concerned with other issues, knotty but fascinating problems such as how we can know whether what our senses tell us is the truth. Or perhaps they believed in the possibility of an afterlife -- a belief that certainly takes the edge off the big question outlined above. This novel, although it's told in the third person, looks at life entirely through the eyes of one individual. He's a successful businessman, surrounded by his family and friends, affluent, well-respected and without any obvious problems. Nevertheless, one fine morning, having created another identity and transferred some of his funds to this new persona, he writes a note to his wife, catches a train, and is never heard of again by any of them.
The purpose of this action is to find the things in life that he's missed. There must be more to existence than making money, siring a family, and so on. So the old man -- he's never given a name, just called "the old man" -- sets out to see what these other things might be.
Goh Poh Seng was born in Singapore, trained as a doctor, and began his life as a writer there. But then he fell out with the authorities -- the details of what happened aren't clear -- and emigrated to Canada. There he at first set up a medical practice in a remote location in Newfoundland, but has now returned to city life.
Dance with White Clouds is clearly set in Malaysia, where the old man travels to from Singapore in the early pages. The description of the landscape, the food, the population, plus the few hours spent in the capital, establish this unambiguously. Not that it really matters where the book is set. This is a fable, and indeed its subtitle is "A fable for grown ups." The subject of its inquiry -- what a wise man should do with a life -- is a universal one, and applies to us all.
As a quest fable, this book follows in the footsteps of some illustrious predecessors. Two notable earlier books that attempted to confront the same question both date from the 18th century -- Voltaire's Candide and Johnson's Rasselas (each published, as it happens, in the same year, 1759). Both of these books had a central character traveling in search of the meaning of life, or rather the best way of living it. Comparisons with Dance with White Clouds are illuminating. The most interesting feature that all three books have in common is that none of their protagonists finds what he's looking for. The second point of similarity is that they're all relatively short narratives. Presumably the quest for an ideal doesn't readily permit sub-plots, the usual means by which works of fiction are spun out to more than moderate length.
These points apart, this Asian quest novel is rather different. In both Rasselas and Candide the format is that the hero visits different kinds of people -- nature-lovers, scientists, philosophers and so on -- in the hope of finding which of them is truly happy. Of course it isn't simply a question of happiness. Voltaire and Johnson were nothing if not thinking people, and neither of them could have been happy if they didn't believe they were living in the wisest possible way. Nevertheless, their heroes both traveled in search of the best way of life, and both came to the conclusion that no one they visited was either happy or enlightened. Best to stay at home and cultivate your garden, Voltaire decided.
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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