A sharp satire on old Malacca and present-day Malaysia

BOOK REVIEW | Historical novels are devilishly difficult to write - when does fiction take over and fact recede? How do you seamlessly juxtapose the two as you move from one realm to the other? How do you make the whole palpable, accessible and, most of all, enjoyable?

Thus, it must have been for Murale (pronounced Muralee) Pillai who launched his debut novel ‘Once Upon a Time in Malaysia’ (346 pages, RM42, Gerakbudaya Enterprise). He triumphed with a brilliant story about Malacca at its zenith as an Asian bazaar and its nadir as it succumbed to the Portuguese conquest of 1511 in the wake of corruption and greed.

Not only that, it is a witty, humorous satire on Malacca’s demise as a major trading port in Asia with the fall from grace having remarkable resemblance to the current state of affairs in Malaysia. Hence the cryptic title, leaving the reader to make his conclusions, except for the epilogue. But let’s keep that for later.

The primary setting for the novel is Malacca and it is true there was a sultan at the time in Malacca named Mahmud Shah who had a ‘bendahara’ (in old Malaya, akin to a chief minister, not a treasurer, second in rank to only the sultan) named, incredibly, Tun Mutahir.

The novel, however, starts in Lisbon, Portugal and King Manuel 1 and his longing to break the Dutch stranglehold on the trade of spices by launching a mission to Malacca, one of the pre-eminent ports of trade in Asia at the time.

The monarch’s choice to lead the mission was...