For the uninitiated, click here to see Walter Woon’s illustrious career.
This will be a short review of
The Advocate’s Devil trilogy. The
three books in the trilogy are: The
Advocate’s Devil, The Devil to Pay and The
Devil’s Circle.
Upon finishing the first book,
I quite liked it even if it was a little quaint. The protagonist in the trilogy
is Peranakan lawyer Dennis Chiang who spent his formative years in an English
public school and Cambridge. Thus Dennis’ voice in the book is very properly
English, with all the vocabulary of an upper-class British upbringing and the
slang and colloquialisms of that age (late 1930s). As mentioned at the start of
this paragraph, I found the narration old-fashioned but interesting but readers
accustomed to action-based and fast-paced books of today (especially of
American origins) might be a little put off by it. My 16-year-old girl didn’t
enjoy the book.
At the start of The Devil’s Advocate, Dennis Chiang had
just returned from England and begun working at the law firm of d’Almeida &
d’Almeida. The book is essentially a collection of cases encountered by Dennis
Chiang, a sort of whodunnit with a legal twist. Think Enid Blyton’s Five Find-outers & Dog or Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators,
but with adults attempting to solve the mystery or resolve the problem. Brisk
pace of storytelling, interesting mysteries, and the added bonus of humorous
writing, even if Walter Woon tends to veer towards the melodramatic at times.
Some gems of humour from the
book:
The
slide into genteel poverty was a common enough phenomenon among the Babas.
Sometimes it was precipitated by a spendthrift wastrel son (a Baba black sheep,
one might say).
Describing a lawyer who was
presenting the other side in a case:
On
the other side was a grizzled lawyer named K. Muthuraman. Muthuraman held
himself out as a barrister and rather fancied that he was good at it. There was
nothing he liked better than the sound of his own voice. He would stand in
front of Judge and jury, hands clutching his robe, declaiming in flowing
speeches like Olivier in ‘Hamlet’. We called him The Yeti because he was such
an abominable showman.
On Dennis’ good friend Ralph,
who is a veritable gentleman:
Ralph
stopped abruptly. He began to get agitated. His face was white. He kept
clenching and unclenching his fists. I’d never seen him quite so upset before.
It was clear that some titanic oath was striving to burst forth. I waited for
the eruption.
‘Blast
the man!’ exclaimed Ralph.
I
let out my breath and sighed inwardly. Being cursed by Ralph was not unlike
being flagellated with a wet noodle.
Taken as a single book, I
would have rated The Advocate’s Devil
above average. However, when you take the trilogy into consideration, things
get a lot more iffy.
The problem I have with the
trilogy is that I find the books a little schizophrenic. The Advocate’s Devil, I’ve already mentioned, is written as a
potboiler mystery, not unlike those penned by Agatha Christie and Dorothy
Sayers. Funny, zippy-paced and loaded with descriptions of pre-war Singapore, I
like.
The
Devil to Pay is set during the war itself. So it’s
structured more like a spy thriller in the first part of the book. Dennis
Chiang and Clarence d’Almeida, the senior partner of the law firm Dennis was
working in, went undercover in a British airbase in Malaya to try to uncover
the culprit who was trying to subvert the Indian soldiers. Then halfway through
the book, war broke out and the tone of the narration turned into that of a war
epic. It was rather jarring.
The last book, The Devil’s Circle, deals with the
aftermath of the war. War criminals had to be tried, Singapore had to be
rebuilt, and the locals (or ‘natives’ as they were called in those days) had to
deal with the withdrawal of the Japanese and the return of the British. But
they were disillusioned by the British’s performance during the war and the
writing was on the wall, where independence was concerned.
There is no dispute that
Walter Woon has got a fine command of the English language. What I find
confusing though is the non-consistency of the books’ structure. In fictional
series, the structure of the books always remains the same, and for good
reason. It is for the sake of continuation. That’s why the books form series!
Think JK Rowling’s Harry Potter — always school-based
adventures, even as the danger and tension escalated book after book; only in
the seventh book did the setting take place outside the school (the children
were on the run), but even then, the tone was the same as the earlier six
books’. Think JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings trilogy — consistent tone and structure. Or Eoin Colfer’s Artemis
Fowl’s series — always about the police-and-criminal partnership between Holly
and Fowl. Ditto Darren Shan’s Demonata
and vampire series. Ditto Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series.
The point I’m trying to make
is that the tone of the narration and, to a certain extent, the genre of the
series should remain consistent to avoid confusion in the reader, which is
certainly what I suffered from by the time I finished the trilogy. I had no
idea what I had just read. After finishing the first book, I had thought it was
going to be about a collection of legal cases, which was obviously not the case
by the time I embarked on the second book, which had only two or three such
cases. The rest of the book revolved around the cloak-and-dagger business and
the invasion of Singapore and Malaya by the Japanese.
If you want to read the
series, I would advise thinking of each of them as a stand-alone book, so that
you don’t get as disoriented as I did.
What I liked about the books:
Walter Woon’s so-correct
Britishisms, his humour, his rather detailed portrayal of colonial Singapore.
You also learn a bit about the law. Not enough to make you a legal expert, but
you’ll learn some interesting facts that you did not know before (unless you’re
a lawyer). And if you’re into Perankan culture, you’ll like the cultural
titbits that he sprinkled liberally throughout the books.
What I didn’t like:
The romance was so off. It’s
true, you know. Guys can’t write romance. A good romance makes you melt and
root for the couple. Totally didn’t happen here.
I already mentioned the
biggest problem for me: the change in genre and tone was too jarring.
Lastly, there were quite a few
mistakes in the books. Grammatical errors and missing words. This I fault the
publisher, who should have engaged a more proficient editor. I expected better
from an established publisher like Marshall Cavendish.