SPOILERS AHEAD
I had a lot of expectations for this book, I really did. It promised so much, that it was going to address elitism. homophobia, racism etc in Singapore, and I was particularly intrigued by the premise of the LGBT Raffles scholar.
This book managed to disappoint me in every promise it made. Frankly, the prose was never to my style, and it felt like the author was trying to write a PSLE essay to impress the markers rather than to write a novel. Examples of some scintillating prose I encountered:
"As if his guts were being scarped out with a spoon (he saw the large grey coils), and the air was being pressed out of his lungs (he saw empty, gasping bags), and his innards were now deposited in an ignominious public heap, The result was not an interview but fleshy puppetry, limp and grotesque."
What was this supposed to mean? What grey coils was he seeing? What the hell was 'not an interview, but fleshy puppetry' supposed to mean? Altogether, it added up to purple-prose for me. It seems to me that the author is fonder of vomiting the thesaurus rather than thinking of how words value-add to a work at all.
Anyways, I was willing to overlook it as a matter of style. I thought that perhaps it was just that her writing style did not suit my tastes, so I soldiered on through the novel, lured by its premise of addressing societal issues.
Boy, was I disappointed by the end of the book. As another reviewer said, the author seems to have put all her energy into heavy-handedly painting the societal issues and creating shock value. And none into addressing them with the subtlety and humanity that these issues required. Her "villains" were two-dimensional and unrealistic, and fond of going on monologues about their views on life, elitism, and women. (Yes, this is about Ming Wei). Does the author think this is how racism and homophobia plays out in real life? She put absolutely no effort into exploring the system structures and mindsets that shape such discriminatory views, and instead, took every opportunity to hit us with heavy-handed, one-dimensional characters.
And there's absolutely no resolution for any of the characters. Not for Brian, who struggles to reconcile his overachieving brother he's grown distant from, with issues he has never thought about. We have no idea how Andrew, the protagonist of this novel, overcame his internalized homophobia other than a 2-liner about cheating the game or something. We have no idea about the feelings of Hwee Leng, Andrew or Brian's parents, or anything really.
All we know is that Singapore is an evil, backward and discriminatory country, which is all the author put effort into describing in the book. Having taken a quick look at the author's bio, she seems to be of the "cosmopolitan" mold that she decried in the book, being of the well-traveled, overseas educated, Chinese mold. I do not want to make this an ad-hominem attack, but perhaps this is the issue here, lmao.
1 star because this tried to address some important issues, -4 stars because it failed.