Timothy Mo
Timothy Mo is a prominent British novelist known for his intricate exploration of themes such as cultural identity, colonialism, and the immigrant experience. Born to an English mother and a Cantonese father, Mo's multicultural background deeply informs his writing. His literary career began with his debut novel, *The Monkey King* (1978), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and established his focus on the cultural clash between East and West. Mo's subsequent works, including *Sour Sweet* and *An Insular Possession*, garnered critical acclaim for their rich character portrayals and complex narrative styles, blending humor with poignant commentary on human resilience amidst societal challenges.
Mo's narrative techniques often employ irony and distancing methods, positioning readers to reflect on the broader cultural implications of the stories he tells. His later works, such as *Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard* and *Pure*, continued to challenge conventional storytelling, with *Pure* examining the intersections of identity and extremism through the lens of a Thai katoey. Despite a significant gap in publication following *Pure* in 2012, Mo remains a key figure in contemporary literature, celebrated for his unique voice and nuanced portrayals of the immigrant experience within British and Cantonese contexts. His works invite exploration into the complexities of belonging and the human condition, making them essential reading for those interested in themes of cultural reconciliation and identity.
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Subject Terms
Timothy Mo
Author
- Born: December 30, 1950
- Place of Birth: Hong Kong, China
ENGLISH NOVELIST
IDENTITY: Chinese descent
Biography
That Timothy Peter Mo is one of the most highly regarded contemporary British novelists is supported by the prestigious honors bestowed upon his work, beginning with his first novel, The Monkey King (1978). Like its prototypical hero, Mo is a son of mixed parentage: his mother, Barbara Helena Falkingham, was English; his father, Peter Mo Wan Lung, was Cantonese. He lived in Hong Kong, where he was educated at the Convent of the Precious Blood, until he was ten, when his family moved to Britain.
In England, Mo attended the Mill Hill School in London, followed by St. John’s College, Oxford, where he earned both his Bachelor of Arts and the university's coveted Gibbs Prize in 1971. He won his next honor, the 1979 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, for The Monkey King, a well-received work focusing on the cultural clash between East and West. This work established both the subject matter and the essential style of Mo’s subsequent novels; the author’s perspective is marked by division, falling between an ironic appraisal of human failing and a sympathy, even admiration, for the courage and resourcefulness of his main characters in coping with a world that is, in many respects, foreign to them.
Mo’s next novel, Sour Sweet (1982), won the 1982 Hawthornden Prize and was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker and Whitbread Prizes. The novel focuses on a family of Hong Kong emigrants who have newly arrived in London—not its most cosmopolitan part, but a cultural backwater whose provincialism isolates them further. While the clash between East and West is again present, the emigrants establish only a tenuous link to the town’s Asian subculture, for the most part, content to live largely as a world unto themselves. In an amusing twist of the old racial stereotype, all White people look alike to the family, especially to its strongest member, the resilient Mrs. Chen. A film adaptation was released under the title Soursweet in 1988, directed by Mike Newell from a script by English novelist Ian McEwan.
Mo’s novels center on reconciliation, a theme unsuccessful only in his third novel, An Insular Possession (1986), with tragic consequences that are more than figuratively monumental. In Sour Sweet, as in The Monkey King, this universal theme is well served, kept from cliché by the perspective of life seen as human comedy—Mo’s crowning achievement is a comic realism often likened to that of V. S. Naipaul. It is not merely the deft delineation of people and their language at which Mo excels; he also portrays their collision with a standard no human could possibly satisfy. All are subject to error, such as the ambulance men in The Monkey King who come for the sister-in-law of the protagonist’s wife after her botched suicide attempt. Her self-inflicted wounds, the reader is told, will heal quickly; more serious are the concussion and broken ribs sustained when these agents of mercy drop her on the staircase.
An Insular Possession was one of England’s most highly lauded novels of 1986. The main storyline could not be simpler: two oceans away from home, a pair of young Americans isolate themselves from the trading community that is their only immediate family by opposing the opium traffic that these uninvited Western entrepreneurs have for so long forced upon China. This apparently historical novel seems old-fashioned, featuring adventure, violence, and intrigue on an epic scale against the panoramic backdrop of the First Opium War (1839–42)—one consequence of which was the British annexation of Hong Kong, an “insular possession” that has figured so prominently in Mo’s life and literature. Yet the novel’s pace, structure, and overall style are eccentric. The pace is considerably slowed by sometimes elaborate syntax and sophisticated vocabulary on the order of “plenilunar,” which typically compromises a vividly Dickensian character description. Frequent stops to chat, often directly to the reader, about everything from ancient history to the current trading system and the interpolation of entire articles from the English trading community’s printed voice, the Canton Monitor, and its upstart rival take An Insular Possession even further away from the usual character and context of fiction. For some, however, these apparent deficiencies—the newspaper extracts, the exchanges of sometimes lengthy letters, the essays on such esoterica as the fine art of heliogravure—augment rather than diminishing the novel’s true focus: not an individual but a place in time and the historic clash of cultures that took place there. Arguably, the bitter irony that resulted is shown to best effect not by a characteristically Western fast pace and linear narration but in a more typically Eastern manner. Evidently, the author’s intent is not the traditional one of drawing in readers but rather an attempt to alienate them to some extent, using sophisticated vocabulary and syntax, irony, and other distancing techniques to establish a twentieth-century perspective on what was a tragic turning point in nineteenth-century Chinese history for more than its obvious victims.
Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage (1991) follows the cowardly protagonist Adolph Ng, an ethnic Chinese hotelier in a fictional southeast Asian island nation whose self-preservation demands most of his time. The novel centers on a bloody invasion similar to that of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975 and reports on the conflict in a nonpolitical style. The Redundancy of Courage earned Mo the 1992 E. M. Forster Award, and both it and An Insular Possession were short-listed for the Booker Prize.
Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995) generated more attention for its controversy than for its merits. Mo’s offense at his publisher’s advance offer and suggested changes to the novel prompted him to turn against mainstream publishing and establish his own publishing company, Paddleless Press, instead. Brownout, set in the fictional Filipino city of Gobernador de Leon, was criticized for its fragmentary nature and vulgar humor.
Mo’s second offering under the Paddleless label was better received. Renegade or Halo2 (1999), narrated by Black Amerasian Rey Castro and also set in the Philippines, earned Mo the 1999 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Mo himself preferred the work and considered the first-person narration to be better sustained than in The Redundancy of Courage.
For his next novel, completed more than a decade later, Mo forwent self-publishing, instead releasing Pure (2012) through independent book distributor Turnaround Books. Through its main protagonist, a Thai katoey (“ladyboy”) named Snooky, who gets caught up in Islamic extremist activities in southern Thailand, Pure explores issues of displacement, disempowerment, and defiance, as well as theology, linguistic quirks, and Mo's constant theme of East-meets-West—in this case, focusing less on the clash of cultures than the amalgamation thereof. By turns bitingly clever and cruelly, shockingly bleak, Pure was widely praised by British reviewers for its wit and its unflinching emotional depth. However, it received no recognition in the form of awards or nominations. In the mid-2020s, Mo had not published any works following Pure, leaving many to speculate on his absence from the literary world. Still, the long gap in works was not out of character for the reclusive author. Literary critics urged readers to explore Mo’s collection of works and his works’ themes of colonialism, cultural identity, and the immigrant experience enmeshed with British and Cantonese cultures.
Bibliography
Facknitz, Mark A. R. “Timothy Mo.” Contemporary Novelists. Edited by Lesley Henderson and Noelle Watson. 5th ed., Chicago: St. James, 1991, pp. 648–49.
Foran, Charles. “The Rise and Fall, and Rise Again, of the Mysterious Timothy Mo.” Globe and Mail. Globe and Mail, 23 June 2012.
Ho, Elaine Yee Lin. Timothy Mo. New York: Manchester UP, 2000.
Lai, Amy Tak-yee. Asian English Writers of Chinese Origin: Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011.
Lawson, Mark. “Pure by Timothy Mo.” The Guardian, 20 Apr. 2012, www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/20/pure-timothy-mo-review. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Liu, Rebecca, and Timothy Mo. "Where Did Timothy Mo Go? Revisiting the Booker Author 'Who Got Away.'" The Booker Prizes, 17 Jan. 2024, thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/where-did-timothy-mo-go-revisiting-the-booker-shortlisted-author. Accessed 9 July 2024.
McGivering, Jill. “Timothy Mo Buries Hong Kong.” World Press Review, Aug. 1991, p. 56.
Noren, Anders. “Pure: Timothy Mo's Neglected Masterpiece.” A Sense of Place Magazine, asenseofplacemagazine.com/pure. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Ramraj, Victor J. “The Interstices and Overlaps of Cultures.” International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. Edited by Robert L. Ross. 5th ed., New York: Garland, 1991, pp. 475–85.
Rothfork, John. "Confucianism in Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 1989, doi.org/10.1177/002198948902400106. Accessed 9 July 2024.
“Timothy Mo - Literature.” British Council Literature, literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/timothy-mo. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Tinkin, Boyd. “Pure, by Timothy Mo.” The Independent, 12 Apr. 2012, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/pure-by-timothy-mo-7640231.html. Accessed 9 July 2024.
Vlitos, Paul. “Timothy Mo.” World Writers in English. Edited by Jay Parini, vol. 1, New York: Scribner, 2004, pp. 307–24.