The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy (The Norton Library)

For colonial life in Malaysia, this trilogy is the best insight into the daily life.

Top-drawer Burgess, putting his characters through mostly comic paces from a mostly chilly authorial distance through three linked novels. But since he wrote from his personal experience of 1950s almost-post-British Malaya and does little to explain the social background, a reader unfamiliar with the peculiar colonial history and resulting ethnic mixture of the Malay Peninsula may...more

Top-drawer Burgess, putting his characters through mostly comic paces from a mostly chilly authorial distance through three linked novels. But since he wrote from his personal experience of 1950s almost-post-British Malaya and does little to explain the social background, a reader unfamiliar with the peculiar colonial history and resulting ethnic mixture of the Malay Peninsula may have to work harder to enjoy the books.   hide