Book review: Sex dolls and a surreal, shadowy Hong Kong in Dorothy Tse’s Owlish

Owlish
By Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce
Fiction/Fitzcarraldo Editions/Paperback/217 pages/$26.51/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3NeyQ6c)
4 out of 5

A map is projected onto a screen. It appears at first to depict a city. Yet, beneath the lines of this map are other duplicate lines. Concealed beneath is a cluster of ghostly cities.

It is in this shadow zone that Hong Kong writer Dorothy Tse’s dark fable unfolds.

Tse’s debut novel, first published in Chinese in 2020 and recently translated into English by Natascha Bruce, is set in a phantasmagorical version of Hong Kong called Nevers.

A former colony of the kingdom of Valeria, bordering the authoritarian republic Ksana, Nevers is a nebulous city on the edge of dream.

The narrative centres on Professor Q, a former refugee from Ksana, now a 50-year-old nebbish. Dissatisfied with his stagnating university career and his lacklustre marriage, he nurses a secret fetish for dolls.

When he comes into possession of Aliss, an exquisite life-size mechanical ballerina, he embarks on an extramarital “affair” with her, aided by a mysterious figure he calls Owlish.

Is Owlish an “old friend” of Q’s, as he claims, or something else – an alter ego, an avatar of the changing city, or more?

Whatever he is, he sets up a love nest for the professor in an abandoned church on a deserted island. There, Q whiles away the days with his mannequin “mistress”, oblivious to the students vanishing from his classes, the protest marches and the political unrest roiling the city.

Tse writes about urban space with fantastic verve. She conjures liminal cityscapes rippling with the flux of late capitalism, gravid with multiplicity.

The city manifests to Q as a person, “slowly rotating to show him its other face” or, in a virtuosic segment of flanerie after hours, swelling as he wanders its dream-like forking paths.

“The city had expanded to several times its usual size,” he observes. “It was airier now, its substance transformed into a porous honeycomb; one misstep and he risked falling into one of its holes where he would no longer be able to distinguish space or time, and from which he would never re-emerge.”

Yet the narrative, instead of exploring these urban possibilities, remains fixated on Q’s erotic fantasies and his relationship with Aliss, who begins to gain sentience but whose feelings about her own nightmarish situation are never fully parsed.

Numbness, ignorance and apathy permeate the novel like the smog shrouding Nevers, which shares a name with the French prison camp where German Jewish writer Walter Benjamin was detained during World War II.

When Q’s wife Maria, a civil servant, accidentally glimpses an urban plan that will reconfigure Nevers beyond recognition in 20 years, she instinctively deletes the e-mail and wishes she could erase it from her mind as well.

The blinkering of the narrative to Q’s lust-addled perspective, or Aliss and Maria’s severely curtailed points of view, can make this a frustrating read.

It is only in the novel’s final pages that the shadow city collides with reality – with horrifying results.

If you like this, read: Diamond Hill by Kit Fan (Dialogue, 2021, $28.97, Books Kinokuniya), set in 1987 Hong Kong. Buddha, a recovering heroin addict-turned-monk, returns to the shantytown Diamond Hill, the colourful inhabitants of which include the formidable Iron Nun and a teenage gang leader called Boss.