Hallo, it's me, Laura King. Last week I wrote about my time in Malaysian Borneo, which I felt was quite different to my experience of Peninsular (or what I keep mistakenly calling “mainland”) Malaysia. We had a few delays along the way, which was frustrating because we had hoped to have that evening to start exploring Kuala Lumpur, but a great consolation prize was that I got a good bit of time reading Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, which was on my big list of books I wanted to read in 2024.
I always assumed that Cold Comfort Farm was grim for some reason, but this is only the case in a very darkly funny way. The praise quotes on my copy called it the funniest book they'd ever read, and I'm not sure if I'd say that as I wasn't laughing out loud the whole time, but I think that's only because I was so shocked! There's a real dark humor that will appeal to a lot of people (me included), but it seems really surprising because the book was published in 1932.
The book is about Miss Flora Poste, who finds herself without a home of her own after her parents die. She isn't particularly sad about it, but downright refuses to become one of those women who goes out and gets a job. She briefly stays with her friend Mrs Smiling, a fun loving London widow, as she plots to secure an invitation to live with one of her many relatives. Rejecting the boring ones that wouldn't offer any entertainment, she decides to descend upon her estranged Sussex relatives at Cold Comfort Farm, after not being at all put off by a deeply ominous letter that should have scared her off. Flora is appalled by the country people's “savage” ways - sometimes wrongly, but other times very much rightly - and throws herself into “civilizing” the mad Starkadders, which was coincidentally a theme in some of the art I saw and read next, though not with the same comic tones.
Flora is a snob and a busybody, but the Starkadders are completely deranged and seem to be living in the Dark Ages still. I feel like if this was published now people would say it's anti-farmer or something and dismiss it, but the book is sharp and witty but very self aware. At the time I described it as “Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love meets Jane Austen's Emma meets Six Cousins by Enid Blyton”, but to use a phrase of my Lady Mother's, I think it's better described as “a panic”.
We arrived in Kuala Lumpur on the final night of the Lunar New Year Celebration, to a late night street party right outside our hotel. I would have loved this had I known about it in advance, but it was a real shock to the system reaching our hotel not long before midnight, having started the day in the rainforest with a 5.30am start and a dawn cruise down the river. We stayed in the Bukit Bintang area, which is apparently buzzing most of the time, but was a real hotspot on the Saturday night when we arrived, and still had a great buzz when we really got to explore the next day. Jin Alaor, is one of the main streets there, I'd full of restaurants and food stalls competing (and in some cases shouting) for your attention, and full of so many choices that it's disconcerting. The nearby Changkat has a variety of different bars and is a great spot for nightlife.
We also visited the Batu caves, a Hindu temple inside a high cave with monkeys and souvenir shops. A taxi driver told us two million people visited in January for a festival which I honestly can't imagine given how chaotic the steep steps were with everyone picking (or in my case, unfortunately, falling) their way up and down around each other. It's a very crowded yet also private experience - individual prayer and pilgrimage takes place along tourists having a gawk, and the temples themselves are a work of art.
Inspired by the 36 degree heat we sought out air conditioning in the form of the National Art Gallery, and the exhibitions within spoke to an effort to reevaluate Malaysian history and cultural identity. When we came in first, there was a lot of information about “Enrique of Malacca”, a Malay explorer on Majellan’s crew who first circumnavigated the earth. Through him, and how his identity had been reconstructed over the years, the exhibition introduces the idea of “the reflective surface of history not always being reliable”. It goes on to explore the history of Eastern versus Western exploration, and the race to be the “one” who maps the world and therefore becomes the owner of the story we tell about it.
I was struck by some writing accompanying the exhibition that read “The tropical natural landscapes that looked peaceful hid the actual narratives: the modern pictorial chaos that swept the country in search of identity”. This is true even in some of the very beautiful early depictions of Malaysia by 18th century expatriates, their scenes of community meeting places and places of natural beauty imbued with very palpable nostalgia and tenderness. Still, as they say, “it isn't all conflict” and as you move through the exhibitions you can feel a sense of post colonial acceptance of the influence of the other South East Asian cultures, or “spirit” of the region as “inherited forms of knowledge” by way of crafts like carving and weaving are celebrated as enriching their art and as a way of tracing cultural identities back through time.
(Cabinet IV - Ahmed Shukri Mohamed. Mixed media)
I was sorry to leave KL after such a short time, and I still regret not exploring elsewhere in peninsular Malaysia like Penang and the Cameron Highlands, but while all I wanted to do was to keep moving at the same pace, seeing as much as I possibly could in a short space of time, I think we were wise when we booked a bit of relaxation to end our holiday. We spent four nights on the island of Langkawi, just off the north western coast of the peninsula, for a few days of swimming, sunbathing, eating and reading before embarking on the long journey home.
In some ways the resort we stayed outside in Langkawi reminded me of the type of resort strip European tourists might visit in places like Lanzarote, but instead of lots of dark sand and large apartment and hotel blocks, apart from the main tourist areas a lot of it is still like a rainforest, including the many “remnant” islands that are dotted along the coastline. We spent a morning island hopping around a few of them, and I couldn't get that phrase, “remnant”, out of my head, thinking about memory and the ghost of history visible in the lush green meeting sparkling blue that makes this island as different to anything I'd ever seen before.
These ideas, as well as time to actually sit still for the first time in a while, became the perfect time for me to start reading Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, an epic fantasy of over 800 pages that had been recommended to me quite a lot since it was published. I read a bit over half of the book while in Langkawi and on the plane(s) home, and finished it back in Ireland while trying to settle back in my normal life. There's a lot to think and talk about with this book, but given when I read it I ended up being really drawn to how history, nation building and religion in this world mirrored what I had been thinking about when consuming art from this region I was visiting.
The book has a large cast of characters, but I was primarily drawn to Ead, a lady in waiting serving Queen Sabran, secretly sworn to protect the Queen from attack while hiding her mysterious background, and at the other side of the world, Tané, a young woman on the cusp of realising her wildest dreams, of becoming a revered Dragon Rider, but faced with a choice that could ruin everything. The tension between the regions in this book was for me the most interesting element, and this is rooted in the decision of the countries, particularly Virtudom, closing ranks after the dark historical period of The Great Sorrow, when the High Western Dragons were banished. To this day, the people of Virtudom think of the East as godless dragon worshippers (for their love of the Eastern, nice dragons) and the East are petrified of catching a plague from the outsiders. Virtudom, particularly, is pious and inward looking, and their origin story is based around a self righteousness that will serve to haunt them as dark forces begin to rise again and people from different parts of the world will have to meet again and learn that the things that separated them might not have been right or absolute at all.
The different foundational stories or myths that the main characters try to hold onto seem to crumble one by one, and their terror in the wake of this new reality that exists outside of their well ingrained worldviews is very striking, and it was hard not to think again about the visual art I had seen in Kuala Lumpur, as well as in Borneo and Singapore, so preoccupied with pinning down identity or culture in the aftermath of so many changes to and influences on that country. Even when the characters learn what can be gained once they break free of their polarized world views, it's scary for them to imagine what might come next as a people, to say nothing of if and when they finally vanquish the threat that has loomed over them for quite long. The real work begins in rebuilding, in learning how to live in the vacuum those old, shattered belief systems left behind, and it is an inspirational and invigorating moment when a powerful character decides at the end of the book that it will be their legacy to lead their people into a completely new world order, to draw from new knowledge and influences instead of just repeating the past.
I thought a lot about how this is done on the macro, national scale in real life, as well as the more personal one, and even how this feels like a mission statement from Samantha Shannon. In this female led, epic fantasy, where the main romance is between two women and gender and sexuality-based discrimination and violence doesn't seem to figure, she has perhaps decided to remake the genre of fantasy into something that is full of new possibility, instead of conforming to the patriarchal high fantasy many people have grown up reading. It made sense that I found Shannon through my friend (and, coincidentally, favourite fantasy writer) Helen Corcoran, whose novels Queen of Coin and Whispers and Daughter of Winter and Twilight really tackle the possibilities of fantasy to create new and more inclusive worlds to reflect or inspire our reality.
I did find Priory of the Orange Tree difficult to get into, even though I was completely hooked by the end. It probably didn't help that I was sipping delicious cold beers while reading a lot of exposition by the pool, because I did find it was front-loaded with an awful lot of information that I didn't think the reader necessarily needed right away, and the pace of the book is very slow until it suddenly turns breakneck. However, the world Shannon has created feels like it has been drawn from a very rich, deep well of imagination and creativity, and the many layers of the novel are balanced perfectly, which is no small feat given the scale and power of each of the stories.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you join me next week in a new installment of LauraEatsBooks… We Move.
I keep meaning to read Cold Comfort Farm! It’s Marian Keyes’ go-to comfort read