More Far Eastern Tales

by W. Somerset Maugham

From the love affair between a missionary and a drunkard to the mystery surrounding a death at sea, this collection gives a warm and humourous insight into life and history of life in the colonies and stands as a superbly entertaining and compelling testament to Maugham's skill and power as a short story writer.

For an alternate cover edition see: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, Asia

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.

His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.

Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.

During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.

Reviews

[তানজীম রহমান]

Fuck Somerset Maugham and his sexist, racist, colonial bullshit.

[Realini Ionescu]

A Man From Glasgow by William Somerset Maugham – one of the greatest novelists of all time, author of The Poet https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... and other superb works

10 out of 10

Somerset Maugham is a fantastic writer, one of my two favorites, although I have found recently that he was critical of Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis https://realini.blogspot.com/2023/03/... - well, not really attacking another of my gods, but expressing some sort of puzzlement

This has been a wonderful summer, in that I have started again the complete stories, with gems like Footprints In The Jungle, wherein we meet, with the narrator, a couple of gentle, likeable people, Olive and Theo Cartright, playing bridge and being described as essential for the community, viewed very well by the community
Except that Olive had been married to Reggie Bronson, a planter in Malaya, who had brought Theo Cartright to his own property, when the latter became bankrupt, and had a very bad, awful time, and he was offered a roof, job and salvation, which he repaid in a quite unexpected way, controlled by…Olive, the strong woman

Olive and Theo have fallen in love, the result of this affair is that she becomes pregnant, and then they decide – actually, she was the strong half of this sphere, if we use Plato’s https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/... take, that we are two halves looking for the other, to form the original sphere – that they could not tell Reggie, he had been so kind, they could not do this to him
Ergo…they kill him, Olive instructs her lover to be in the jungle, and use the shotgun, make it look like it was a robbery, and then they will marry (which they would do, we know that from the start), they have a scare, because the news sounds ‘your husband has been wounded’, and for some moments, she thinks he may survive, and reveal who the killer is

Most of the short stories are outstanding, and it is also the case for Before The Party https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... which starts with preparations for the party we have been told about in the title, Mrs. Skinner is looking for suitable attire for mourning
Harold had passed away, he was her son-in-law, married to Millicent, who will reveal some unbelievable details, due to the rumors that have been spreading, she has to tell the truth, which will be a chance to find some closure, and put the record straight, as regards the reverence for the late man, which is not justified

Millicent seemed to be on track to become an ‘old maid’, more than one hundred years ago, there was this thing with women waiting for the suitable fellow, who had to come before they were thirty or something, and Harold showed up, returning from the Far East, and asked the woman to travel with him to the colonies
However, once married, the spouse finds that he had been forced to do that, the governor had made it clear, you either marry, or you are fired, because the man had been drinking excessively, and although there is a chance now, he is falling to addiction again, stops and makes promises, but it is useless, he is lost…

Therefore, when Millicent returns form a trip taken with their daughter and finds the husband passed out, unshaven, loathsome, with an empty bottle of whiskey next to him, and she has the parang, native sword is there, the next thing she knows, there is blood, and the fellow is dead, which will be recorded as suicide…
What is wonderful about the writings of Somerset Maugham is that we do not read about the good super hero, defeating some villain, it is much more complex than that, Millicent is not a cruel human, she is somehow forced into acting, however, it is murder we are talking about, and maybe we need the Anatomy of a Fall

https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20... we have different narratives and characters and I will also mention Makintosh, in which this is the assistant, and Walker the boss, the former hates the latter, and we have a Reversal of Fortune, just like Aristotle prescribed
Aristotle said that we need reversal and one example is the climax in Oedipus Rex, when the king finds that he had killed his father, and then married his mother – ergo the famous Complex – and in Makintosh, we have the representative Walker, he rules for the British, in a fight with the natives, over a project

Walker has been kind to the locals, but now he had asked them to make a road, and he wants to pay them twenty pounds or so, which they refuse, on advice from the son of the leader of the tribe, so the astute white man hires men from another island, who get the money, and besides, they are fed and hosted by the…local tribe
According to their traditions, the guests are offered food and shelter, and that is ruining the natives, they face starvation, thus they want to stop this, agreeing to just finish the work, for that money, but no, walker does not accept even an end of the project without pay, he wants the locals to pay the twenty pounds he owes the workers
It is pushed to the point where he is assassinated, only at this nadir, he proves what a generous man he was – in all that cruelty – because he does not want Makintosh to reveal that he was killed, he wants this to be buried with him https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/20...

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/u... – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/r...

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

‚Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus’

“From Monty Python - The Meaning of Life...Well, it's nothing very special...Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”

[Ruby Jusoh]

(Reflection) Ten very readable stories by Maugham. I love his writing - not overly descriptive - and his stories are rather simple. They are problematic, though. Maugham was one of the many English writers who visited colonial Malaya and had a lot of misguided notions about the land. These notions appear repetitively in his tales.
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📚 More Far Eastern Tales by W. Somerset Maugham
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The tales, though set in Malaya, are mainly about white people working here. The white people, despite living more lavishly than the native, are unhappy about a lot of things. They dislike the weather, their servants, the language barrier, the failed expectations, the distant dream of returning to England.... Just generally miserable. The white people in Maugham tales are also very UNHAPPILY married. I think all married couples in the book have affairs. Not sure why. Loneliness, perhaps. Or the desire to mate with people of their own colour since they barely deem the natives human. No, I am not joking. Maugham, being English, also assigns his white people with a higher moral character albeit dubious series of action. His white people always mean well though harm others. They shoot their wives' lovers and beat women but only because they are 'pushed' to such extent. They drink alcohol but only to forget about their problems. No matter what they do, they always remain superior. The natives - Malays, Chinese, Dyaks - are there to serve and disappoint them. The native women are there as their plaything - not good enough to be married but available as their sexual partners and mothers to their children, whom he calls 'half-caste'. The problematical portrayals are off the charts, people!
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Overall, I sense that Maugham utilised Malaya as a backdrop to write stories that are essentially about the white colonialists. He propagated Eurocentric values, that is obvious, and represented the thinking of most Europeans those days. It is interesting reading his stories decades later, finding people of my background in his characterization and noting how things have changed

[Rhiannon Williams]

There was something quite soothing about reading these gentle tales, but simultaneously it was a bit unsettling to get that insight into life in the Far East in the days of British colonial rule.

There was a lot of dressing in "ducks", putting on your topee, gin pahits on the veranda, and playing tennis and bridge at the club. Attitudes towards the native population (mostly of course in their position as servants) were interesting as were those to women.

The stories followed a bit of a theme - stiff upper lip hiding affairs, illegitimate children, and in several stories - murder! There was a lot of mental anguish usually relating to shame, guilt, and losing one's reputation in the white community.

I did enjoy the stories, but I found the voice to be very samey, meaning that I sometimes lost which story I was in and had to try and make myself read a whole story in one go.

[Shruthi]

Slightly racist, some were hit or miss, some were pretty good

[Paul Cornelius]

It is almost impossible to avoid thinking about Conrad while reading these stories of Maugham's set in Southeast Asia. There is a startling difference in how the two writers use their backdrop. With Maugham, it is just that, a backdrop. The stories focused as they are on the domestic and individual psyches of British of a certain social class, could be set almost anywhere in the British Empire. Not so with Conrad, who actually incorporated the people and the very land itself into his work. See Almayer's Folly and Lord Jim. As a result, Conrad paints with a far grander psychological canvas than does Maugham. Not that the Maugham stories are uninteresting. Quite the opposite, they do provide a stark picture of a certain class of Britisher at a unique turn in the history of the world--right before the empire was to be dismantled. And it is far from a sympathetic one. Drunkards, failures, depressives, and the sexually frustrated populate these tales. The rivers and the jungle only provide a boundary to lock these people within.

This is a companion book to another volume of Maugham stories set in Singapore, Malaya, Borneo, and sometimes a little beyond, Far Eastern Tales. I do not know if the editor so intended, but this second set seems somewhat more focused on the interior world of the protagonists and their self obsessed musings. And then, maybe not.

[Laine]

As someone who actually lives and works in the regions Maugham write about, these stories come crashing against my 'orientalist' nerve. He is writing about a time before WWII when colonialism still reigned and Dutch and English still ruled over the 'filthy natives' through their relentless thirst for economic wealth. These stories provide such intimate glimpses into the lives of my expat predecessors, showing how at least the ones in these stories, were to be pitied for their sacrifices in the name of duty to their motherland. One hundred years later, much has changed - or has it? Independence and self-rule have been hard won, but there exists the same relentless thirst for economic wealth. The shameful ways in which people react to power have not changed. Racism and infidelity remain - no matter who is at the helm. Apparently Maugham wrote about real people, who were furious with his depictions of their lives. Knowing his stories are based on real people and real confidences gives them even more poignancy.

[Matt]

Maugham is a master storyteller - his tales are narrative palimpsests with layered insights which unfold patiently, not in an arrogant hurry. Despite the leisurely pace, we are nonetheless transfixed.

High colonial Asia is the backdrop for these stories, and while the post-modern deconstructionist will- in his/her desperate attempt to dismiss this as yet another dated artefact of imperialist colonial self-justification - latch onto the sundry references revealing condescending/racist attitudes, in reality Maugham uses the setting as a vehicle for amplification of what are, in essence, domestic dramas.

[Morgan Miller-Portales]

‘More Far Eastern Tales’ by W. Somerset Maugham is a collection of short stories set mostly on the far eastern reaches of the British empire, in which we are made privy to the lives of several colonial settlers and the difficulties they were faced with. Borne of Maugham’s personal experiences in then Malaya, Singapore and other outposts, we find the author at his best. Whether downright caustic or gently poking fun at his characters, Maugham proves a shrewd judge of character even if, at times, some of the observations can be somewhat besmirched with the colonialist superiority of the times. Most entertaining on a purely anthropological value.

[Sumanya]

The master storyteller, Maugham takes you to the far east, compelling you to engage with the complexities of being a colonizing power. What it means to the representatives in distant and different cultures. I love Maugham's short stories.

[Emma]

Real rating 3.5.

[V Bhasker]

Excellent book . The best short stories of Somerset Maugham . Pleasure to read.

[Michelle]

I'd never read Somerset Maugham before, but the first story in this compilation is also the basis for part of the plot in Terror in Topaz (#4 in the Harriet Gordon series by A.M. Stuart), so I thought I would try it.

According to Wikipedia, "Maugham was considered persona non grata among the expatriate British community in the Federated Malay States following the publication of The Casuarina Tree, as he was felt to have betrayed confidences and to have painted the community in an unflattering light through his focus on scandal." Stories from that volume are in this and its predecessor Far Eastern Tales.

And that's basically what most of these stories feel like: it's like you strolled into the British club and heard all the hot gossip. Or you got someone to confess to you his most intimate confidences. There's no overarching goal or moral to each story. You don't really learn what happens later for most of them. This is just a thing that happened to these people at this time. And in that sense it's quite interesting, even if it doesn't require a lot of Maugham's own skill other than to render into prose.

But it's also a very colonialist mindset. There are no viewpoints that aren't white or at most self-hating mixed race. There's a lot of racism, sexism, and classism. You can tell that Maugham never really talked to a native person, and barely to any women. On the other hand, these isms aren't praised or swept under the rug. They're just there, ready for the reader to judge.

[Annabelle]

Naturally, I read this gem minutes after finishing Maugham's Far Eastern Tales. Thus the same cut and pasted rave review:

What could be more pleasurable than reading Somerset Maugham's selected tales from the More Far Eastern outposts of the former British Empire? That delight is surpassed only by a languorous rereading of this particular set of stories, in this case, for my third or fourth time.

The (high and low) dramas in Maugham's Far Eastern Tales and More Far Eastern Tales are stories I have a particular weakness* for: period pieces, preferably set in South and Southeast Asia, involving British, Dutch, and American colonizers--district officers, engineers, rubber and tea plantation owners and overseers assimilating to their exotic, tropical locales with other expats over gin pahits, cheroots, tiffin, lawn tennis, bridge, and gossip. Best exemplified in the novel Elephant Walk by Robert Standish, and in cinema, in The Seventh Dawn with William Holden and Capucine. And most certainly, epitomized in this book of ten captivating, intriguing short stories, which I first read in my two-volume boxed set of short stories by Maugham.

* What accounts for my fetish? Could it be because I'm descended from colonizers (Spain) and colonizees (Philippines), and have, since childhood, observed similar social dynamics, felt the same racial undercurrents? (Just substitute rubber with sugar cane plantations, gin pahits for rum cokes, and bridge with mahjong.)

[Tom]

I was into it enough that I thought about making a gin pahit, but not enough that I went through with it: you'd have to figure out what kind of gin they'd have been drinking in interwar Malaya, and I imagine less botanicals figured than anything than they do in anything in my cupboard, and then I thought about how for authenticity I ought drink it at room temperature, and then I decided it would be a bit of a poor show. Some of these stories were quite good, I suppose, but collectively they become a sort of hologrammatic image of the limitations of a worldview, though that, I think, is to over-sell them: a lenticular print, perhaps. The last and the first stories were the best, I had no idea Benedictine was so colonialist, and I've looked up what a 'stengah' is a half dozen times and it just refuses to stay in mind.

[Ryan]

Tawdry love affairs of the colonials posted to Asia during the early twentieth century. After reading many of Maugham's short stories one forgets the titles or what happened in any particular story, they all seem to meld together and give a general impression of what kind of lives were led during those bygone days from another era. Most draw the reader in and are deeply engrossing, the emotionally charged dramas underneath the superficial surface of everyday goings are indeed the author's trademark.

[Mark Jeffries]

I'm quite a fan of W Somerset Maughan's work but these stories are very much of their time. Although I enjoyed the writing I was a little put off by some of old fashioned offensive racist language in the description of the natives. Basically, stories about the lives of posh ex-military British fellas working and living in colonial outp0sts such as Borneo and Sri Lanka.

[Jeff Thompson]

As one would expect, similar to its predecessor and just as good.

[Julia]

I read this review and said, couldn't it be both? The author of said review said maybe it is both, and lent me the book. And I'd say that's true; Maugham is a great writer of small domestic dramas, and also a patronizing colonialist asshole. I almost stopped after the first couple of stories, which were just too weighted down with the theme of upright-Europeans-corrupted-by-the-decadent-East, but it got better, with most of the stories having no more than the usual unheeding colonial condescension. However! There were occasional bits where I thought the (purportedly?) Maugham-himself narrator present in some of the stories was subtly problematizing said condescension, which made me think maybe the first couple of stories were ironic too? But it's hard to tell; I would prefer to think he was slightly enlightened, but I'm not ready to just give it to him.

[Sherene]

It's a well written collection although some plot lines seem a bit familiar along the way.. What I find grating about the book is that alongside narrating tales of expats in the East, it depicts the worst of British racism but the author was only depicting the state of affairs and thinking in the colonies then so I did not dock any points for that while rating the book, more a 3.5 than a 4 even so... I daresay some of that racism continues to persist in British society, even in the upper echelons of society, thus my irritation with it, I suppose.

[Vivamalasia]

La vida de los británicos en Malasia no fue como en la India. En la India los británicos venían su sentido de "civilización" permanentemente amenazada. No es fácil imponer tu cultura en un país con miles de años de historia. En Malasia los británicos, que siempre fueron pocos en número, estaban interesados en sus materias primas, en sus puertos comerciales y poco mas.

Maughan, estuvo en Malasia poco tiempo. Dos estancias de pocos meses, pero le sirvieron como materia prima para sus cuentos. T

[Lysergius]

A collection of short ranging in content from a love affair between a missionary and a drunkard to the mystery surrounding a death at sea, which provides the reader with a warm and at times humorous insight into life and history of life in the British colonies. It is a superbly entertaining and compelling testament to Maugham's skill and power as a short story writer.

[Guoyun Feng]

Finally finished reading this book! The short stories are not as moving as the rest I read, but it's good to know his writing styles!