Fool's Gold: The Malayan Life of Ferdach O'Haney

Frederick Lees

Silverfish Books 2004; RM30

When I first picked up this book and looked at the jacket, I thought I was in for 280 pages of Saturday night bridge-club reading. The picture on the back of the author, Frederick Lees, looks like a mug from the directory of the Everton Exuberant Eighties club. The first chapter's description of a gin-soaked luncheon brought to mind images of Hemingway without the adventure.

However, my eyes widened and my preconceptions were dispelled by the third chapter, in which the protagonist makes friends with a hooker. And let's face it, a hooker's a good friend to have. "He has obviously jumped into the Far Eastern pool at the deep end," goes the story.

But this story about a British officer beginning his foreign service career in the Malaya of the 1950s is a reasonably good read; it's an interesting and informed look at the political machinations of the British in the final days of the colonial adventure.

The author, now 80 years old, was himself a Malayan Civil Service officer, and so a lifetime of experience colors the book. One envisions that the characters are composites of people the author knew, or perhaps of a person the author once was himself.