'His real wife, his houri, his paramour was everywhere waiting, genie-like, in a bottle. The hymeneal gouging-off of the bottle-top, the kiss of the brown bitter yeasty flow, the euphoria far beyond the release of detumescence.' (from 'Time for a Tiger') The novel is set in the twilight of British rule of the Malay peninsula. The other two novels that make up 'The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy' are 'The Enemy in the Blanket' and 'Beds in the East'. (Or you could call 'Time for a Tiger' the first of a quartet of Southeast Asian novels, the fourth being 'Devil of a State', about Brunei.) Dedicated in Jawi script on the first page of the book to 'all my Malayan friends', it was Burgess's first published work of fiction and appeared in 1956. (His first work of fiction was the Gibraltar novel 'A Vision of Battlements'.) The title 'Time for a Tiger' is a reference to an advertising slogan for Tiger beer, then, as now, popular on the Malay peninsula and elsewhere. The action centres on the vicissitudes of Victor Crabbe, a history teacher at an elite school for all the peninsula's ethnic groups. The fictional Mansor School, in Kuala Hantu, is modelled on the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar, Perak. Victor Crabbe, a 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 pupils. But the headmaster, Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings. Nabby Adams, a hard-drinking police lieutenant who is addicted to (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 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) homosexual 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. Alladad Khan drives Crabbe, Fenella and Adams to a nearby village, along a route where they face ambush by Chinese communist terrorists. 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.

• published: 09 Jan 2014
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