1940, the Federated Malay States. The British are hanging on by their fingernails to South-East Asia while Japan has already occupied Manchuria and is making its way via Siam into Malaysia. Against this Second World War backdrop, Tash Aw’s first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, patterns a beguiling narrative mosaic around a Johnny Lim.

Lim, whose origins remain unknown, starts off as an indentured labourer in a British-owned tin mine in the Kinta Valley and scales dizzying heights of material success and notoriety. But who exactly is he? A fearless communist guerrilla who works with the grass roots to defeat the Japanese or a dirty collaborator? A self-made business wizard or a scheming manipulator? A doting husband to Snow Soong, the most beautiful woman in the Kinta Valley, who dies in childbirth, or a womanising, corrupt, loose-living villain?

The answers are almost incidental to the process of querying. In fact, Johnny, protagonist only nominally, remains as mysterious a lacuna in the end as he was in the beginning, a mirror for reflecting the various narrators’ personalities, biases, unreliabilities. The three sections that comprise this novel have three narrators. The first is Snow Soong’s son, Jasper, now in his forties, trying to piece together a credible narrative of his father Johnny’s life and so rationalise his deep antipathy towards him.

The second strand is Snow’s diary in 1941, when she went on her belated honeymoon to the mysterious Seven Maiden Islands with Johnny, accompanied by Mamoru Kunichika, a suave Japanese professor, Peter Wormwood, an English aesthete and lover of all things oriental, and the repellent Frederick Honey, tin mine boss and colonialism’s last defender.

The final instalment is an account of the same event by Wormwood, interspersed with his present in an old-people’s home and the distant past of how he came in contact with Johnny, Snow and the others.

Needless to say, the three stories differ. It’s a narrative device that needs some rest, like the seaside donkey. But in a book as bewitchingly written and gracefully assured as this, it’s hardly worth quibbling about, particularly when the author makes such dazzling use of its strengths: a sense of unravelling mystery, a devastating revelation towards the end, a complexity that defies a neat tying of all the threads or pat answers. To the end, Snow and Johnny and, to a lesser extent, Kunichika, are resilient to complete understanding. There is only conflicting information, a dance of possibilities; never a pinning down or comprehensive resolution.

Aw makes the most of the exoticism of his setting. India, China and Japan are almost reeling from overexposure in fiction but Malaysia is relatively new to the English reader. In one way it’s a thin book in the sense that it doesn’t shake up the pattern of life to show us something startlingly new, but the story Aw tells is mercilessly gripping and his prose is lucid, uncluttered, beautiful.

Where Aw emerges as uncontested winner is in the subtle modulations of the three narratorial voices. From the clunky unreliability of Jasper, through the pellucid prose of Snow’s journal to the intelligent, slightly camp, aesthetic eloquence of Wormwood, Aw orchestrates a graceful ballet of dissonances and congruences, of echoes and discords.

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