By Toh Hsien Min

The Secret Goldfish and Other Follies
Tan Teck Howe
Firstfruits Publications (2004) / 241 pages / SGD 18.90

One of the things about going to university in Oxford is that you sometimes feel as though you are a student in a tourist attraction (in my case, I could have been a tourist in a studying attraction, given how little work I used to do). But whenever a friend or relative comes visiting, the roles change. You feel obliged to play the tour guide, to bring them through to the cupola of the Sheldonian, to Duke Humphrey's Library, through Christ Church College, and not forgetting the special delights of your own college. It's a role most students play very well, having picked up a range of trivia about various nooks and crannies in the university town just by living there, but at the same time, most students do it with a sense of irony that however strange the collegiate system might seem to an outsider and however quaint this custom of going to examinations fully suited, gowned and mortarboarded might be, it's really something we are part of and do. Yes, the Radcliffe Camera is one of the most photographed sites in Oxford, but it's also where I eventually put in long hard hours slogging for Finals.

That's why I think the average reader might come away from Tan Teck Howe's new novel The Secret Goldfish and Other Follies with a sense of fascination. All these things that Oxford students / British students / Singaporean students in Oxford get up to. How intriguing. Is it true that "Lectures are not compulsory, sometimes irrelevant and useless"? (Yes.) Do they really leave soapsuds on dishes without rinsing them off? (Yes.) Are there Singaporeans who go up there and mix exclusively with Singaporeans? (Yes.) Do they throw flour on candidates who have finished exams? (Yes.) Are there no French people at Oxford? (Y... ah, no. Every Easter half the French school-going population descends upon Oxford.) In the same way a Singaporean novelist writing about Singapore often has to explain what bak kut teh is and why there is a ban on chewing gum that is at present only partially relaxed by the US-Singapore FTA, Tan plays tour guide very often, in passages such as this:

We are going to the Percival Fresher Week Bop – a "bop" is basically a cheap student disco organised by the college. All the events of the week lead to this. Fresher Week Bop is the first college social event of the year where everyone tries to make his or her mark. Show up in the wrong outfit or be seen talking to the wrong person and you could be ostracized for the rest of your undergraduate life. Whatever happens, you have to act like you are pals with everybody, and never be caught standing around on your own. Smile and show that you are having the time of your life – that is how to survive.

Surely all these bits of random Oxford trivia only form the backdrop for a much more urgent story? Well yes, sort of. Coming back to the fictitious Percival College in his second year, Tong Jin Wei gets to share a tutorial with Claire Chang Kaye, a girl of mixed African-European-Chinese descent from Trinidad and Tobago. Being the typical student, he falls in love, and tries to win her heart whilst efficiently dispatching pints of lager, playing in a band and watching movies at the Phoenix. There is a rival for her affections, and so he spends a lot of the book moping, hanging out with his housemates and playing chess with a mathematician from Queen's, before the academic year runs out on him.

I say "sort of" because all the scrapes described in the book are, again, par for the course. They're nothing that the typical student, or at the least, the typical student's best friend, hasn't done. It's one thing to write "Of course, there're the stereotypes", it's another thing to then wheel them out to populate the book. At one stage, Tan even points explicitly to the stereotyping:

I look at the other members of the boat. There is Adam Bronstein, the associate student from Brown University and his pal, Sal Richards, also from Brown. They hang out together. Adam is dark, short and hunched while Sal is fair and tall. They fit completely the cliché of the different but inseparable buddies. [Italics mine.]

The extreme case of this is that what is meant to be a shock close to the end is entirely predictable for anyone who has been through Oxford. I could identify what was going to happen and which character it was going to happen to as early as a little more than halfway through, not so much because of telling clues left by the author but because the character fit another unfortunate Oxonian stereotype.

Another danger about this is that stand-alone Oxford clichés often serve little purpose other than to try to push the flavour. It's like adding MSG. At one point, the tour guide situation even comes to the narrative fore in a snippet with virtually no link to what comes before or after:

'Excuse me, er...' he says. He doesn't try to talk to me in Japanese – they usually do – which is refreshing. I like him already.
'Yes?' I say.
'Er, where is the University?' he says haltingly.
My favourite tourist question – answer to which has devastated countless visitors to the city and transformed many a world-view. I explain to him that there is no 'University' as such – and that there is no single building he can take pictures of and call 'Oxford University'.

Had Tan written this snippet, perhaps early in his writing of the novel, and then looked to fit it in somewhere so as not to waste the effort? In a similar vein, there are long passages of filler conversation in which random Oxford students mumble to one another on random student concerns. Although these are indeed passably real, passably real conversation is frequently dull.

I say all this with the full awareness that someone who hasn't studied at Oxford might enjoy the book rather a lot more than I did. This is not only because large chunks of the book read like a rehash of the Oxford Student, but because – curiously enough – Tan writes very well, or rather, it is possible to see enough talent peeking through the stereotypes to look forward to Tan writing a stylish and important book once he leaves easy shortcuts behind him. Take for example this passage, which comes after the protagonist Tong has been accused by his best friend of being closed-up:

I'm reminded of a neighbour of ours who lived in the flat upstairs. He was an elderly Indian gentleman who lived alone and whose flat was cluttered with things – antique clocks, ivory tusks, typewriters, television sets, radios, sculptures, paintings, rugs – which he had accumulated from his many travels abroad. I remember asking him why he had so many things and he said that if he didn't have them his flat would be 'too empty' since he lived alone. 'You must have things,' he used to say. 'Only when you have people then can you get rid of the things.' Looking back now, he must have been a very lonely man, although at the time he seemed to me to be the happiest and most jovial of all my neighbours. I remember aspiring to be like him when I grew up. He never did find the people to replace his things with. He died one day and some people, his relatives I think, came to clear out his flat. His possessions were packed into six gigantic wooden trunks and taken away in a large truck. I don't think anybody really knew him. He didn't live on in anyone else's heart or mind. That was a real death and a true tragedy – not to be known. I don't want to end up like that – which means, like Ellie says, I'll have to open up.

Leaving aside minor quibbles such as the loose use of the word "tragedy", the delicacy of this passage showing the protagonist exploring his own psyche through the agency of a memory promises an epiphanic lift for the novel, which is a positive, even if the promised development doesn't happen and Tong ends the novel pretty much the same character he began it as. As the novel stands, populated by cardboard cut-outs ready-made in a vibrant town just over fifty miles north-west of London, it's hard not to be left a little cold by the evidence of creative laziness. Maybe, with thousands of Singaporeans going overseas to study every year, The Secret Goldfish is a book that had to be written, and if Tan had not set it in Oxford, someone would have eventually written it for Harvard or Fenland Poly instead. Nevertheless, I cannot help but be reminded, given the role the river Isis plays in Tan's novel, that the definitive Oxford student novel has in my opinion already been written, and Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson brings much more verve and farce to a town that sometimes takes itself too seriously:

Rain! His very mantle was aspersed. In another minute he would stand sodden, inglorious, a mock. He didn't hesitate.
"Zuleika!" he cried in a loud voice. Then he took a deep breath, and, burying his face in his mantle, plunged.
Full on the river lay the mantle outspread. Then it, too, went under. A great roll of water marked the spot. The plumed hat floated.
There was a confusion of shouts from the raft, of screams from the roof. Many youths – all the youths there – cried "Zuleika!" and leapt emulously headlong into the water. "Brave fellows!" shouted the elder men, supposing rescue-work. The rain pelted, the thunder pealed. Here and there was a glimpse of a young head above water – for an instant only.

This, of course, is the famous scene in which the entire male population of Oxford throws itself into the river for love for Zuleika. If Oxford students are exactly the characters that populate The Secret Goldfish, then come back Zuleika, all is forgiven!

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