It’s Showtime - my third novel revealed.

I’ve been re-working the draft of my third novel Tianming Traviata recently.

The novel is an off-beat family drama with a cast of quirky, colourful characters. The main character is a 70-year old cabaret singer, Evie, who is still going strong in her sequinned gowns and feather headdresses. She owns the only nightclub in a small town in Malaysia and sings old show tunes, with the “grand dame” air of days gone by. Her neice Kit-Mei works as software programmer in Kuala Lumpur, a blogging, city-slicking modern young woman who is very much part of 21st century Malaysia. The family are thrown into crisis when Evie’s daughter disappears and the clash between the old and the new generations are brought to a head.

I had been writing it in Standard English using a third person narrative structure. It was zipping along nicely - but it just lacked “oomph” and I was finding that I was getting bored. The dialogue bits were fine when Evie was in the thick of the action. But the narrative was just lacklustre. Now, if the author is bored by the novel, there’s no hope that the narrative will be able to grip others!

So I put it away for several months. Then a few weeks ago, Evie’s voice kept coming back to me. In the dialogue bits, she is in full flow, loud and raucous and full of energy - speaking in Malaysian English. In contrast, the third person narrative was in measured, proper, sensible full sentences with proper syntax, grammar and punctuation.

And I thought, why not try writing the narrative bits in Malaysian English? Yah, why not-lah? So stupid I was before. This one is Evie’s story-lah so, of course, got to tell it with her voice, isn’t it?

Since then, I’ve had such fun getting the narrative down in the voice of a 70 year old cabaret singer who will not let her arthritic hip stop her doing high-kicks and whose language is full of verve and peppered with “-lah”s.

When I’ve got a bit further along with the text, I will upload a podcast reading of the first chapter so you can see what you think. In particulary, I would be interested to see the response of Malaysians to the use of our form of the English language in fiction.

~~~~~~~~~~~

To hear what Malaysian English sounds like in contrast to Standard UK English, listen to my podcast “Two Voices” about my “schizophrenic” relationship with language.

~~~~~~~~~~~

I will write more next week about “-lah” and its use in Malaysian English.