Review: The Night Tiger, by Yangsze Choo

(Some spoilers below. I was provided an e-ARC by the publisher in return for an honest review)

I loved this book. It’s opening scenes, where a young Chinese-malaysian boy finds himself bound by oath to retrieve the missing finger of his recently-departed employer, an English doctor, captivated me immediately. The book is historical fiction, set in 1930s colonial Malaysia, threaded through with supernatural elements drawn from local belief systems. The two chief protagonists are the young servant boy, Ren, and an apprentice dressmaker, Ji Lin, although the two do not meet until quite late in the book. Working for his former employer’s old colleague, Ren searches for the missing finger, and finds himself watching on as a series of mysterious and sinister deaths - and rumours of a weretiger - circle around his new employer and the hospital where he works. Meanwhile, Ji Lin moonlights as a dance-hall entertainer to keep her mother out of debt, and finds herself at a loss when a client leaves her in possession of a bottled, preserved human finger. She turns to her stepbrother Shen, a trainee doctor, and soon both are sucked into the strange patterns of accidents and schemes at the hospital.

I don’t think I can properly describe this book beyond that bare summary. It is complex, and delicate, and although deeply engaged with the supernatural, treats its magical elements with a gentle touch. It depicts a complex multicultural society in colonial Malaysia, through which the white colonists float in largely oblivious privilege - perhaps my favourite component was the way in which the narrative absorbs key white characters (the two doctors, and the daughter of a local plantation owner) into the magical plot while demonstrating that they remain cut off from actually understanding what is happening to and around them.

My chief complaint is that I felt the end resolved too swiftly, and I wasn’t entirely happy with the semi-incest plotline between Ji Lin and Shen. Not that I necessarily have anything against the trope, but it wasn’t fully developed here, and, again, the ending left the whole situation rather too simplistic.