The Malayan Trilogy

1956 1959 book series by Anthony Burgess

The Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy in the United States, is a comic 'triptych' of novels by Anthony Burgess set amidst the decolonisation of Malaya. It is a detailed fictional exploration of the effects of the Malayan Emergency and of Britain's final withdrawal from its Southeast Asian territories. The American title, decided on by Burgess himself, is taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem Ulysses: 'The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks: | The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep | Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, | 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.' (ll. 55 57)

The three volumes are:
Time for a Tiger (1956)
The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)
Beds in the East (1959)

The trilogy tracks the fortunes of the history teacher Victor Crabbe, his professional difficulties, his marriage problems, and his attempt to do his duty in the war against the insurgents.

Time for a Tiger, the first part of the trilogy, is dedicated, in Jawi script on the first page of the book, "to all my Malayan friends" ("Kepada sahabat sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu"). It was Burgess's first published work of fiction and appeared in 1956. The title alludes to an advertising slogan for Tiger beer, then, as now, popular in the Malay peninsula. The action centres on the vicissitudes of Victor Crabbe, a history teacher at an elite school for all the peninsula's ethnic groups – Malay Chinese and Indian – the Mansor School, in Kuala Hantu (modelled on the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar, Perak and Raffles Institution, Singapore). Victor Crabbe, a resident teacher at the Mansor School, seeks to tackle the threat posed by a boy Communist who appears to be conducting clandestine night time indoctrination sessions with fellow students. But the headmaster, Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings. Nabby Adams, an alcoholic police lieutenant who prefers warm beer ("he could not abide it cold"), persuades Crabbe to buy a car, enabling Adams to make a commission as a middleman. This is despite the fact that Crabbe will not drive because of a traumatic car accident in which his first wife died and he was the driver. Crabbe's marriage to the blonde Fenella is crumbling, while he carries on an affair with a Malay divorcee employed at a nightclub. A junior police officer who works for Adams, Alladad Khan, (who has a secret crush on Fenella) moonlights as a driver for the couple. Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh, a (married) gay cook, works for the couple but is being pursued by the wife he has fled from after being forced to marry her by his family. The threads of the plot come together when Alladad Khan drives Crabbe, Fenella and Adams to a nearby village, along a route where they face possible ambush by Chinese terrorists. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they return late to the school's speech day and an unexpected chain of events follows that transforms the lives of all the main characters.

The title is a literal translation of the Malay idiom "musuh dalam selimut", which means to be betrayed by an intimate (somewhat similar but not quite the same as the English "sleeping with the enemy"), alluding to the struggles of marriage but also other betrayals in the story. The novel charts the continuing adventures of Victor Crabbe, who becomes headmaster of a school in the imaginary sultanate of Dahaga (meaning thirst in Malay and identifiable with Kelantan) in the years and months leading up to Malayan independence. Crabbe is made headmaster of a school in Dahaga, in the east coast of Malaya (in an introduction to the trilogy, he identifies the sultanate as Kota Baharu in Kelantan). Burgess was dismayed by the design of the cover of the 1958 Heinemann edition of the novel, presumably designed in London. It shows a Sikh working as a ricksha puller, something unheard of in Malaya or anywhere else. He wrote in his autobiography (Little Wilson and Big God, p. 416): "The design on [the] dust jacket showed a Sikh pulling a white man and woman in a jinrickshaw. I, who had always looked up to publishers, was discovering that they could be as inept as authors. The reviewers would blame me, not the cover designer, for that blatant display of ignorance."

The title is taken from a line spoken by Mark Antony in Antony and Cleopatra II. vi.49–52: 'The beds i' the east are soft; and thanks to you,/That call'd me timelier than my purpose hither;/For I have gain'd by 't.'

Initially published by Heinemann in discrete volumes, all known editions have since included all three novels in one volume. The list below excludes out of print editions, notably the paperback editions published by Penguin and Minerva in Britain, and W. W. Norton's hardback edition published in the United States in 1964. Burgess, Anthony The Malayan Trilogy. (London: Vintage, 2000) This is the only edition that includes Burgess's retrospective introduction. Burgess, Anthony The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993) U. S. paperback edition.

Bloom, Harold (ed.) Anthony Burgess. (New York: Chelsea House, 1987) Lewis, Roger Anthony Burgess. (London: Faber, 2002) A biography of Burgess. Yahya, Zawiah Resisting Colonialist Discourse. (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1994) Kerr, Douglas Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008) pp 191–196. Erwin, Lee 'Britain's Small Wars: Domesticating "Emergency"', in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth Century British and American War Literature, (eds.) Piette, A. and M. Rawlinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) pp. 81–89.

Warner Bros. purchased the film rights to the book trilogy. A live action feature film based on the first book is in the works.