The Booker Review

“I was about to turn seventeen, and at that age, what did I really know about time?”

The South is, at its heart, a touching coming-of-age story set among a Chinese immigrant family in 1990s Malaysia.

The book opens (perhaps slightly jarringly?) with a liaison between its two young male protagonists, Jay and Chuan. I found this an interesting choice, seeming to interrupt the crescendo of the will-they won’t-they furtive-glances motif which comes later – though I must admit, despite this, I was utterly hooked by page 40. The atmosphere feels electric with promise, even though we think we already know where it ends.

In the spirit of Call Me By Your Name, we follow Jay and Chuan as they explore the rural surrounds of a farm (inherited by Jay’s mother; worked by Chuan’s father), one formative summer in their youth. The story knits together cleverly in a style reminiscent of The Bee Sting (Paul Murray’s novel of Booker Prize 2023 shortlisting), as we slowly discover the parallels and intricately linked relations of the two men’s lives and families, and how everyone is struggling in their own ways. We see fascinating glimpses of Malaysian history and the social mores of a previous era through the lens of the parents, contrasted with a splash of modernity in the form of Jay’s sisters, riding around on motorbikes and rebelling against their elders with cigarettes and life plans. We hear the boys oppressed by a deeply homophobic society; the women cornered by patriarchal structures.

A lack of chapter titles – or even numbers – gives the storytelling a timeless quality, the prose sprawling on languidly like the Southern summer, while the fluidly changing narrators and viewpoints left me a little disoriented, as if wandering in a heat haze. And I found the dialogue very The Little Prince (probably my all-time favourite book) – that is to say – philosophical in a beautifully simplistic way: tales of learning how to human, learning how to relate to other humans.

And, reading this book in a heatwave, I found the splashing lake scenes quite refreshing, the scenery so immersive.

One small detail that slightly bothered me (as a notorious pedant for details!) was the older sister’s constant texting of a boyfriend. Although never quite stated, from context I dated the story to between the Asian Markets Crash of 1997 and the Millenium – but (perhaps except for business-people) I didn’t think mobile phones took off till at least the early 2000s? So that stood out to me as anachronistic. Maybe I missed something – or maybe we’ll chalk it down to the slightly-unsettling, weaving-around-in-time quality of the narration leaving me lost in sequencing.

Even more than its observations about youth and how we learn to be in the world, this book has something poignant to say about siblingship, I feel. Jay realises gently of his middle sister: “Whatever closeness we had experienced in our shared existence up to that point would not be enough to prevent our lives from pulling inevitably in opposite directions”. Perhaps there is something resonant here about the enchantment of a childhood Summer and the people who were important to us.

Overall the story left me with a warm, bittersweet yet hopeful glow. “How wonderful”, says Jay, “ that something could be simultaneously dying and striving to stay alive”. There is a certain magic in learning about the World.