Is Tash Aw the Malaysian Graham Greene?
By CHARLES R. LARSON The comparisons between Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World and the novels of Graham Greene are not overblown. International intrigue, expatriates in exotic locales, humanistic and moralistic dilemmas for the major characters—these are some of the signatures of Greene’s work and, now, Aw’s also, including his first novel The Harmony Silk Factory. I, for one, welcome a contemporary Graham Greene, a writer whose works are sadly overlooked today, at least in academic circles. Greene was my hero nearly fifty years ago when I lived initially as an expatriate in a non-Western environment. Like Greene, Aw is also a master at novelistic construction, the multi-layers of human attraction and interaction that bind people together—often complete strangers, frequently from disparate cultures–and, then, too frequently pull them apart. In Map of the Invisible World, there’s Margaret, an American teaching for many years at a university in Jakarta—single and in her early forties
