In English the versatile suffix “ish” captures the somewhatness of something, as when we call a cloud “whitish” or say “Life is normal. Ish.” In Dorothy Tse’s whimsical satire about a version of contemporary Hong Kong going through hellish transformations, Owlish – “something like an owl but also not like an owl” – is a wise and elusive character who quotes from the Bible, speaks in a coded language, and appears and disappears randomly. Regardless of who or what Owlish is, they must find a way “to survive” as “who knows what will happen next? Everything is changing.”
Owlish is an old friend of Prof Q, “a hack teacher in a debased, cultureless little city” who, despite a long-term marriage to the near-perfect Maria, has fallen in love with Aliss, an animated lifesize ballerina doll. “I’m in a spot of trouble,” Q says. “What you need is a love nest,” Owlish replies. A wild tale of a failed love affair, the novel might be seen as a literary version of what Stanley Cavell dubbed the Hollywood “comedy of remarriage”. Katherine Hepburn could play the “luminously beautiful” Maria, but Prof Q is definitely not Cary Grant.
We’re not in Hollywood either but an uncanny realm in which fiction becomes a series of Russian dolls combining dream and reality. As mirrored in Natascha Bruce’s faultless translation, Tse has devised an intricate naming system that exposes a brutal world in disguise: Ksana, a Buddhist state of awakening, stands for China, and Hong Kong is called Nevers, a name redolent of systemic oppression (Walter Benjamin was imprisoned by the Nazi regime in Nevers in Burgundy).
It’s tempting to call Owlish a fantasy, or an anti-fairytale. The book is not shy of drawing in references, including to Mephistopheles, Kant, the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Orwell and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. However, Tse’s acerbic, freewheeling spirit is generically flirtatious, rather than genre-bound. She steals from the western canon with chutzpah and panache to create a subversive tale about perilous desire, high-rise bureaucracy and sophisticated corruption in a defenceless city under siege.
What’s most evocative about Owlish is its scrupulous recall of the city’s quirks: snake soup, the springtime season of athlete’s foot, the community of foreign domestic workers, Wetlands of International Importance, and mall-lands full of luxury handbags. For centuries, this east-meets-west city has thrived on contradiction and pragmatism. Most characters in Owlish embody deep-seated paradoxes of their own. Trapped in marital doldrums, Prof Q seeks sexual excitement in a doll. Maria, an immaculate wife and obedient civil servant, fails to challenge her husband’s escapade and the government’s secret plan for drastic urban development. Aliss, the female Pinocchio or Asian Olympia, comes alive only to be exploited. And Owlish, we learn later, operates beyond appearances.
To love the impossible is a form of protest. As we witness Q’s ecstasy and downfall, we can’t help but recognise that he “has ventured boldly into a dream state, an act of rebellion against himself”. Boldness comes in many shapes and sizes in the novel but none is bolder than Tse’s account of student protests against “modification to high-school history textbooks”, the “groundless disqualification of an election candidate”, “malicious destruction of the student newspaper offices” and other injustices. These events reflect the widespread student protests across universities in Hong Kong, and most significantly, the siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in November 2019, when footage of riot police, teargas, water cannon, masked protesters and petrol bombs was broadcast around the world. Tse lets this all rumble away in the background, unseen by Q’s blinkered love-gaze.
The professor’s outrageous obliviousness is symptomatic of the sense of apathy and alienation many felt during this turbulent period. However, he has plenty of distractions, not least the kinky, slinky, sometimes macabre sex between him and Aliss in a disused church furnished with “a triptych of the Garden of Eden”. The erotic passages featuring puppet striptease, masturbation with dolls and Aliss’s study of the Kama Sutra show Tse’s eerie ability to turn the camera on the audience, asking us to identify the dominating power structures in play. It’s hard not to read the doomed erotic relationship as a political allegory of desire for change in an intractable situation. In Owlish, sex exists in the “shadow zone” between the carnal and carnage. For Aliss, “dreaming allows us to transcend the bounds of reality”, but we’re also told that “this city contains dangers you can’t even imagine … lurking like bear traps in a wood”.
In the last 20 or so pages, when the novel occasionally switches to the second-person perspective, some may find it tries too hard to tie up its loose ends. That aside, Owlish wittily captures a recent crisis moment in Hong Kong, exploring a discombobulating state caught between civilisation and its discontents. Tse writes poignantly in the afterword about waking, dreaming and memory. Since 2019, having seen my beloved city on a knife-edge, I often turn to the question posed by Keats in his Ode to a Nightingale: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream?” Owlish may read like a dream but I hope we’ll hold on to it as a vision.
• Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£13.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
