The Long Day Wanes

The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy is the title of Anthony Burgess's trio of novels published in the late 1950s, which explores the effects of the Malayan Emergency and Britain's final pull-out from its Southeast Asian territories. The three volumes are:

Related Topics:
Anthony Burgess - Malayan Emergency

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• Time for a Tiger (1956)
• The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)
• Beds in the East (1959)

With the trilogy, his first published venture into the art of fiction, Burgess staked a claim to have written the definitive Malayan novel (i.e. novel of expatriate colonial experience of Malaya) to set alongside George Orwell's Burma (Burmese Days), E.M. Forster's India (A Passage to India) and Graham Greene's Viet Nam (The Quiet American), and continuing in the tradition established by Rudyard Kipling for India and, for Southeast Asia in general, Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham.

Related Topics:
George Orwell - Burmese Days - E.M. Forster - A Passage to India - Graham Greene - The Quiet American - Rudyard Kipling - Joseph Conrad - W. Somerset Maugham

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Unlike Conrad, Maugham and Greene, who made no effort to learn local languages, but like Orwell (who had a good command of Urdu and Burmese, necessary for his work as a police officer) and Kipling (who spoke Hindi, having learnt it as a child), Burgess had excellent spoken and written Malay, and this is reflected in the verisimilitude and interest in indigenous concerns that marks the trilogy.

Related Topics:
Urdu - Burmese - Hindi - Malay

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