The Black Isle

May 21, 2012
Tan’s ambitious debut is a gripping historical novel set on an exotic island in Southeast Asia during a 60-year span that encompasses the island’s primitive condition as a British colony, the WWII Japanese invasion, and its postwar transformation. Thanks to a deep natural harbor, fine climate, and convenient position between India and China, the island becomes “the shiny opal in the empire’s Far Eastern crown.” But since the heroine has the gift—or curse—of seeing the dead, this is also a gothic tale with scenes of grisly supernatural horror, its atmosphere full of dark omens and a sense of the macabre. Narrator Ling, who later changes her name to Cassandra, is born in early 1920s China. As an adolescent, she goes with her father and twin brother to the aptly named Black Island, where she lives through one harrowing event after another as she’s forced to summon spectral apparitions in order to placate the men who rule her life: her feckless father, the Japanese officer who makes her his mistress, and the ruthlessly ambitious Oxford-educated politician in whose bed she finds herself next. Tan’s imagination seems boundless as she involves her protagonist in events that force her to evade moral scruples in order to stay alive. Conveying an atmosphere of corruption, violence and betrayal, Tan anchors the narrative with authoritative details of time and place, and social and ethnic rituals. Her descriptions of the supercilious British and the arrogant, depraved Japanese are brutally candid. Her stark, knife-sharp images of horror-inducing events—a woman in sexual congress with an octopus, a schoolgirl’s body dangling from a ceiling fan, forced sex in public as entertainment for Japanese army officers, occult rites in a cemetery, prisoners forced to harvest fleas from bodies to make pathogens, sharks bursting out of an aquarium tank and devouring children, a huge gathering of ghastly corpses—are not for fainthearted readers, but the tale as a whole maintains its mesmerizing power throughout. Agent: Barbara Braun.

August 1, 2012
Tan debuts with a cinematically epic ghost story set largely on a Malaysian island that bears a striking resemblance to her native Singapore. In 2010, fearing that she is being erased from history, an aged woman living in Tokyo recounts her life to a visiting professor: Born in 1922 Shanghai, Ling and her twin brother, Li, are inseparable until 7-year-old Ling realizes that she can see ghosts while he can't. From then on, ghosts surround her, some charming, some sorrowful, some horrific. During the Depression, Ling's father loses his teaching job. At the insistence of Ling's agoraphobic mother, he travels to the island in search of work, taking only the twins with him. They live in poverty, but Ling enjoys the cosmopolitan city until her father takes a job managing a rubber plantation when she is 12. He proves inept, so for three years Li and Ling run the operation, engaging in a little incest along the way, until the spirits of the dead rise up in an act of violence. As Japanese power builds ominously, Ling takes a job with the wealthy Wee family. Before long, she is engaged to sweet, dopey Daniel Wee and has changed her name to Cassandra. Recognizing her as a kindred spirit, the Wees' chauffeur, Issa, encourages her to corral her power over the spirit world, but she bungles her attempt. The Japanese invade; the Wees are destroyed; and she becomes a Japanese officer's sex toy until the British return victorious. Cassandra reunites with Issa and with Daniel's former schoolmate, Kenneth. Helping them in their struggle for postwar independence, Cassandra enlists a host of child ghosts who wreak uncontrollable havoc. As Kenneth rises in the political world, he becomes Cassandra's secret lover, but their affair is doomed: He embodies the relentless pursuit of ghost-free prosperity, while she can't shake the haunted tension between the present and the past. Cassandra is compelling, but despite graphic, sometimes gratuitous eroticism and violence, the ambitious novel eventually becomes a slog through too many ghosts.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 15, 2012

Cassandra has fled Shanghai with her father and twin brother for the Black Isle, a British colony in the Indonesian archipelago teeming with immigrants and ghosts, which only she can see. There's also trouble among the living: even as Cassandra wrestles with impossible love and her increasingly important role in the booming colony, war threatens--the book opens in the 1920s. An intriguing-sounding debut from filmmaker Tan.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
Tan reveals a rich imagination and a lush style in this first novel about a woman with the gift of second sight. Ling moves from teeming Shanghai to the remote Black Island in the Indonesian archipelago with her father and her twin brother. There they witness the island's metamorphosis from a British colony to a community under siege when the Japanese invade during WWII. Despite her extraordinary powers, Ling, who renames herself Cassandra, finds herself unduly influenced by the men in her life: her hapless father; her weak-willed lover, the scion of a wealthy island family; a sadistic Japanese commander, who makes her his wife; and, finally, a powerful but ruthless political leader educated at Oxford. Detailed descriptive passages convey not only cultural customs but also the horrors unleashed by Cassandra's powers: a vicious army of risen corpses, cannibalistic sharks, and the recurring vision of a schoolgirl in the process of hanging herself. Dark in tone and especially graphic in its descriptions of the sadism of the Japanese soldiers, this is a frequently riveting if grisly story that will sweep readers into the action.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2012

From a young age, Cassandra was cognizant of the ghosts around her. She witnessed their tortured presence during a childhood in Shanghai and continues to see them as she moves to the Black Isle, a British colony in the Indonesian archipelago, with her father and twin brother. Cassandra's visions and her brother's recklessness tear them apart and signal the brutality that will define her life. The beginning of World War II and Japan's occupation of the colony lead her to her first doomed romantic relationship. After a Japanese colonel named Taro violently destroys her new family, she is forced to serve as his political pawn while witnessing the growing number of souls looking for revenge and closure. VERDICT Tan constructs a debut novel that is beautifully written yet deeply disturbing. Gritty and intensely erotic, it grips readers with Cassandra's visions while pushing them away with the brutality of her life. Not a story for the faint of heart, it will engage those looking for a gothic depiction of WWII in Asia and the ghosts that haunt us. [See Prepub Alert, 2/2/12.]--Madeline Solien, Deerfield P.L., IL

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.