Far Eastern Tales

Far Eastern Tales is a collection of short stories by Somerset Maugham, first published in 1922. The stories are set in various parts of East Asia, including China, Malaysia, and Singapore. They explore themes of love, betrayal, and the clash of cultures.Maugham was a British colonial administrator who served in Malaya and Singapore. His experiences in these countries gave him a deep understanding of the people and cultures of East Asia. This understanding is evident in his short stories, full of vivid descriptions of the settings and characters. The stories are also well-written, with Maugham's prose being elegant and engaging.One of the things I most enjoyed about Far Eastern Tales is its diversity of stories. There is something for everyone in this collection, from tales of love and loss to stories of adventure and intrigue. I was particularly impressed by the story "Rain," which tells the tale of a man stranded on a deserted island with a woman he barely knows. The story is full of suspense and suspense, and the ending is genuinely satisfying.Another highlight of Far Eastern Tales is how Maugham captures the essence of East Asian culture. His stories are full of insights into the customs and traditions of the people of this region. I found myself learning a great deal about East Asian culture while I was reading this collection.Overall, I highly recommend Far Eastern Tales to anyone who enjoys short stories or is interested in learning more about East Asia. Maugham is a master storyteller; his stories are entertaining and thought-provoking.Additional thoughts:The stories in Far Eastern Tales are all relatively short, making them perfect for reading on a train or bus.The collection is also excellent for book clubs, as the stories will spark lively discussions.I would recommend this collection to anyone who is a fan of Somerset Maugham's work and anyone looking for a new author to discover.

Maugham is one of my most favourite writers, so this book is a welcome addition to my collection of his works.

I loved these brilliant, atmospheric stories set in South East Asia during British colonial rule.Somerset Maugham transports us to the jungle, the lonely plantation house, the resident’s bungalow, the club, the hotel verandah where sunburnt white men in long chairs are drinking gin slings and stengahs, the deck of steamers plying the South China Sea, the kampong, the polo ground, etc. etc.Against this tropical backdrop Maugham’s totally believable characters convincingly play out their human dramas (or comedy as in the forgettable “Mable”).

W. Somerset MaughamFar Eastern TalesVintage, Paperback, 2000.8vo. 278 pp. Selected by John Whitehead.First published thus in 1993.ContentsFootprints in the JungleMabelP. & O.The Door of OpportunityThe Buried TalentBefore the PartyMr. Know-AllNeil MacAdamThe End of the FlightThe Force of Circumstance===========================================This is an interesting and fairly well done selection of ten short stories by Somerset Maugham, all of them more or less set in the Far East. First published thus by Mandarin in 1993, the volume contains one real treasure which should be pointed out immediately.By far the most important short story in this book is ''The Buried Talent''. This fine Malay shocker is one of the greatest mysteries in Maugham's voluminous oeuvre. I remember quite well my first time reading it. I was captivated by the so different, but equally tragic, lives of the two opera singers, Blanche and Charmian, but I could not for the life of me remember to have read the story before. I knew I would have remembered it, with all this talk about singers, voices and opera. Careful examination of the tables of contents of all four volumes of Maugham's ''Collected Short Stories'' (Vintage, 2000) clearly showed that the story is not to be found there. Nor could I locate it in Heinemann's or Doubleday's editions (in three and two volumes, respectively) of Maugham's ''Complete Short Stories''. Certainly it is not in any of the nine collections Maugham published during his life either.As a matter of fact, and as far as I know, ''The Buried Talent'' is the only mature short story by Maugham (first published in magazine in 1934) which never appeared in book form during his life. Why? No idea. None of the critics and biographers whose wise volumes I perused with admiration has offered any explanation. The story is really fine and has one of the most surprising and shocking endings Maugham ever conceived; it goes without saying that it is masterfully narrated, combining past and present in Maugham's usual and very subtle way. It is as compelling a story with as vivid characters as it is possible to achieve in so short a space (for the piece is not at all long). Maugham either forgot all about it or never thought it worthy enough to be reprinted in any of his books. Either possibility is highly unlikely. Maugham is known to have forgotten completely some of his early short stories, those written before the First World War, but never something published in magazine as late as 1934; and of course it could not have been written before the ''Great'' war because at that time Maugham had not been to the tropics yet; nor does the writing style resembles anything else but the mature Maugham, for that matter. Why Maugham would have thought the story unworthy is quite beyond me, too; among the 91 pieces in his collected editions there are a number which are distinctly inferior to ''The Buried Talent''. Maugham may well have thought that the story didn't fit into ''The Mixture as Before'' (1940) but sure it did fit pretty well into ''Creatures of Circumstance'' (1947); indeed, the purpose of the latter, as his last collection, was to collect everything in the genre of the short story which Maugham thought worth reprinting in book form, often after extensive revision of course; yet he didn't include ''The Buried Talent''. Strange. Mystifying. To the best of my belief, the short story appeared for the first and only time in book form (except for this Vintage and the earlier Mandarin editions of course) exactly 50 years after its publication in magazine: ''Traveller in Romance'' (Clarkson N. Potter, 1984), the invaluable for every true Maugham admirer collection of uncollected writings selected, edited and introduced by John Whitehead.Hardly surprisingly, the stories in the present volume were also selected by Mr Whitehead. Which is indeed quite curious since in his critical study ''Maugham: A Reappraisal'' (Barnes and Noble, 1987), Mr Whitehead dismisses with a great deal of contempt Maugham's shorter short stories, if I may put it that way. It is strange that Mr Whitehead should have included no fewer than three such short stories in this volume; moreover, they are either not among Maugham's best ones or have little if anything to do with the Far East. The triad in question consists of ''Mabel'', ''Mr. Know-All'' and ''The End of the Flight''. The last two were first published in book form as parts of the collection ''Cosmopolitans'' (1936), significantly subtitled ''very short stories''; the first appearance of ''Mabel'' in book form was among the chapters of ''The Gentleman in the Parlour'' (1930), one of Maugham's travel books. Of these three, only ''Mr. Know-All'' can safely be called a masterpiece. It is one of the funniest things Maugham ever wrote. I don't know how many times I have read it - perhaps 15, maybe 20 - but it never fails to make me laugh, or at least to bring a couple of smiles on my lips. Yet its inclusion in a book titled Far Eastern Tales is debatable, because the whole action takes place on a ship that crosses the Pacific but never really reaches the Far East; nor do the story contain any of Maugham's usual themes about white people on the borders of the British empire; it is just an anecdote designed to amuse, but within its limitations it is perfect. It must be a very dull and churlish fellow who fails to be amused by such delicious trifle. ''Mabel'' and ''The End of the Flight'' are just a little more typical Far Eastern tales; they at least are set there but the former tells about one woman extremely determined to marry one particular man and the latter is one of Maugham's few forays in the field of dark and inexplicable mysteries. Both makes a very nice but quite forgettable read. Mr Whitehead might just as well have substituted them with one or two of Maugham's long stories with Far Eastern setting. For there his real genius lies.The rest six stories come, equally, from Maugham's two collections entirely dedicated to Far Eastern settings: ''P. & O.'', ''Before the Party'' and ''The Force of Circumstance'' are part from ''The Casuarina Tree'' (1926), whereas ''Neil MacAdam'', ''The Door of Opportunity'' and ''Footprints in the Jungle'' were first published in book form in ''Ah King'' (1933). These all are true Far Eastern Tales and they do show Maugham at his very best. Well, almost. One of these pieces is fascinating and compelling, certainly, but equally unsuitable for such volume and this is ''Neil MacAdam'''. Indeed, this is probably the weakest of all long tropical stories Maugham ever wrote. I surmise this is at least partly due to the fact that it runs contrary to Maugham's own definition of the so called ''exotic'' short story, namely such that might well have occurred in other colonies but certainly not in England or Europe as a whole. But the basic story in ''Neil MacAdam'' is the brave attempts of the eponymous hero to escape the claws of a Russian nymphomaniac. It is described most vividly and with Maugham's usual penetration into human mind, and the lush tropical rain forest does add to its vividness, but it could certainly have happened in any other locale all around the world. Even though the jungle is crucial for the story itself, the characters seem to be left untouched by it. This is surely not the case with the last five stories here. They represent Somerset Maugham as storyteller and tireless explorer of human nature at his absolute Far Eastern best.''P. & O.'' has a somewhat unusual place in Maugham's Far Eastern canon. The reason for this is not that the action - like that of ''Mr Know-All'' - takes place entirely on board, but rather that the story is another one in which Maugham plays with magic spells, pagan rituals and other such creepy stuff, an area quite untypical for him. But unlike ''The End of the Flight'', ''P. & O.'' is much longer and infinitely more complex. Together with the surprisingly spooky story of a planter's chronic hiccups - I know it doesn't sound spooky at all but, believe me, it is - there is an adroitly interwoven subplot about a woman whose total indifference to her advancing age almost amounts to charm. Indeed, Mrs Hamlyn has always been one of my greatest favourites in the long line of memorable female characters created by Maugham. For all her vanity and taste for melodrama, she is in possession of common sense and compassion which make her all but irresistible. ''P. & O.'' is a most evocative and effective story, literally bursting with memorable characters and many of the themes Maugham most relished: marital infidelities, the malaise that so often affected white man in the Far East, human snobbishness, hypocrisy, loneliness, happiness, wretchedness, life and death.''Footprints in the Jungle'' is one of the three stories (the others are ''The Letter'' and ''The Book-Bag'') for which Maugham confessed that he had received them complete and just wrote them down. He was being a bit too modest. These stories may well have rested more on fact than his others, but they all have Maugham's landmark quality - penetrating character depiction - and it is really hard to believe that that could have come to him from the outside. ''Footprints in the Jungle'' is one of Maugham's rare attempts to write a crime story, something he always said he never had the gift for, including in this very story as a first person narrator. If one understands a crime story necessarily as a whodunit stuff, one has to agree with Maugham; there is little doubt who killed the Reggie Bronson here. But Maugham was never interested in the story itself; this may sound quite surprising for he was famous - or notorious, if you like - for being a storyteller and his stories have proven to be most suitable for screen and stage adaptations. Yet, for Maugham it was always the characters that counted. ''Footprints in the Jungle'' is no exception, though at first glance it may seem that they are somewhat sketchy and too much stress is laid on the plot. This is due no doubt to Maugham's extraordinary mastery in the narrative which is at once his blessing and his curse: it makes for unsurpassed readability but it often leads critics, or other readers who are simply not serious, to severely underestimate his remarkable talent for creating living people on the pages.''Footprints in the Jungle'' is one of the finest examples of the confessional stratagem, if I may put it that way; that is, the story is told to a first person narrator by somebody who had taken some part in it, the police inspector Gaze in this case. It is indeed interesting to observe that from Maugham's twelve long Far Eastern tales included in the two aforementioned collections, only two are told in first person singular: ''Footprints in the Jungle'' and ''The Book-Bag''. Unlike the much more common first person narratives in Maugham's European stories, or the one in ''The Book-Bag'' for that matter, ''Footprints in the Jungle'' is told mainly in the words of the police inspector. But he is as shrewd and observant as the narrator himself; moreover, in addition to important questions quite to the point, the latter does add a number of subtle touches, especially about the main characters, that ultimately make the story quite unforgettable. It is a powerful exploration, not so much of the concept of crime and punishment in human society, but of the tenuous and difficult to define relationship between people's minds and their actions. How much of the former is reflected by the latter? Which is the real one? How should one deal with the apparent contradiction which often arises between them? I don't know. But I do know that the final words of Footprints in the Jungle are some of the most haunting Maugham ever penned:'I'll tell you what, there's one job I shouldn't like,' he said'What is that?''God's, at the Judgment day,' said Gaze. 'No, sir'''The Force of Circumstance'' is probably the most heart-rending story Maugham ever wrote. Surely it is one of his best, ''exotic'' story par excellence. There are few other cases in Maugham's voluminous short fiction in which he drew natives as an integral part of his plots. The most notable example is perhaps the no less poignant story ''The Pool'' from ''The Trembling of a Leaf'' (1921), a collection with the very misleading yet geographically quite apposite subtitle ''Little Stories from the South Sea Islands''. Unlike ''The Pool'' which deals with mixed marriages between white men and native women, ''The Force of Circumstance'' looks at another side of the same problem: white men taking native women, almost girls actually, as mistresses in order to kill the terrible loneliness that beset them in remote outstations. Now it has suddenly occurred to me that ''The Force of Circumstance'' is actually closer to the story ''Masterson'', first published in book form as part from ''The Gentleman in the Parlour'' (1930), and which treats precisely the same problem but on a smaller and certainly less shattering scale. These native mistresses often lived for years with the lonely District Officers who took them and not seldom had children by them; but when the white man was going to marry a white woman the native females were provided for and promptly discarded, together with their children and without ceremony; they had known that the arrangement had been temporary and would one day come to an end. Well, it might not always have happened that way: ''The Force of Circumstance'' tells about the alternative. Guy and Doris had been married for nine months and had had a jolly nice life in what seems to be a pretty godforsaken outpost in the jungle - until Doris discovered that the native woman who had been making a nuisance of herself during the last few days had actually lived with Guy for ten years and had had three children by him. Then their affectionate, touching relationship collapses completely. No amount of love or affection, or pity perhaps, can possibly save it.The ending is hardly surprising, but what strikes the reader - by which of course I mean that it always strikes me - is Maugham's writing. Rarely, indeed, did Maugham write with such power and psychological insight about an affectionate relationship that is completely devastated. The character depiction is superb. Guy's wretched loneliness during those long, long nights soon after he entered the Government service as but a lad of eighteen are immensely affecting; after all he did what five out of six white men did at the time; it was not he who decided but the circumstances. But the real tribute to Maugham's powers of characterisation is his ability to persuade me not to be angry with Doris. Otherwise I would be quite furious with her and would gladly seize her for the throat and give her a very good hiding. But in the end I am sorry for her too. For it is the force of the circumstances with her too. The circumstances of her sex or the circumstances of her English background (Guy was born in the East), who could tell? She does realise that she is unreasonable and acts very foolishly, she doesn't blame Guy for anything for she quite understands he didn't have any choice - yet she can't help herself; whatever holds her, physical disgust or mental psychosis, it is stronger than any reason. In the end all the warmth of their relationship had turned into piercing coldness, all the playful chaff and ironic banter had turned to indifferent chatter and bitter remarks. In the end they just shook hands.The core of ''Before the Party'' is no less harrowing a story about disastrous marriage but at its bottom lie very different circumstances. It also has a great deal of comedy and even a touch of satire in it. The whole story is told in retrospect by Milicent, a remarkably composed widow who has just come back to England from the Far East, and her vivid account of her husband's stupendous drunkenness and miserable death gives quite a shock to her complacent and conceited family. Here Maugham has an ample opportunity to have some fun at the expense of his middle class compatriots and you can bet your life he doesn't miss it. But his main concern, of course, is the disturbing yet arresting mixture of incongruities which comprise the human nature and which are so much more sharply revealed against the lush tropical background than in the old, tired and mundane Europe.It is a well-known fact that ''Before the Party'', as virtually all of Maugham's stories, was based on real people and real events - but it is seldom that BASED is stressed strongly enough. Maugham published the two short notes from his notebooks that were later transformed into ''Before the Party'' as early as 1934 in the preface to his first volume with collected short stories, ''East and West'', and 15 years later - and full 26 after the story first appeared in magazine in 1923 - he reprinted them in a collection of notes he thought worthy of reprinting, ''A Writer's Notebook'' (1949), adding a charming contemporary note in italics. I quote the latter source here in full. Everybody who has read ''Before the Party'' will hardly fail to notice how far Maugham went from these two short notes; not to mention that even in them his formidable powers of observation are quite evident and make for an absorbing read:''The D.s asked me to dinner to meet some friends of theirs, husband and wife, who were spending few days in Singapore. The man was Resident somewhere in British North Borneo. Mrs D. told me that he had been a fearful drunkard and took a bottle of whiskey to bed with him every night which he finished before morning. He became so tiresome that the Governor sent him home on leave and told him that if he didn't sober up by the time he came back he would have to dismiss him. The man was a bachelor, and the Governor advised him to find a nice girl in England and marry, and she would keep him straight. At the end of his leave he came back married and a reformed character. He never touched a drop of alcohol.They came to dinner. He was a big, fat man, with a very naked face, rather bald, prosy and pompous; she was smallish, dark, neither young nor pretty, but alert and evidently competent. She was very lady-like. She was the sort of woman whom you meet by the dozen in at Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham or Bath - born spinsters who seem never to have been young and who will never, you think, grow old. They have been married five years and seem very happy. I suppose she had married him just to be married.I never saw them again, and they never knew what they had let themselves in for when they came to dinner that night. They suggested to me a story which I called 'Before the Party'.''''The Door of Opportunity'' has always been one of my greatest favourites among Maugham's short stories. I often re-read it and never cease to marvel at the astonishingly skillful storytelling and the incredibly alive characters. The beginning is quite ordinary: Alban and Anne are coming back from the Far East for good. But while he is pretty voluble and awfully excited, she is silent and sullen. There are quite enough hints to let the reader know that their relationship is on the verge of disaster. But this doesn't come until the last few pages, after the whole story has been unfold in retrospect, layer after layer. On the surface it is an adventurous piece about courage and cowardice, but the main theme is in fact quite different.Indeed, ''The Door of Opportunity'' may well be viewed as one of the finest explorations in fiction of one of Maugham's most characteristic notions which he expressed numerous times in his non-fiction writings: if art and culture have any real value, they must improve man's character. Quite obviously this is not the case with Alban Torel. He is the proverbial intellectual snob: immensely presumptuous and conceited, completely unable to confess his own error of judgement and perfectly incapable of shame or remorse; for all his cordiality and heartiness, consciously or not, he never misses to let those around him know how infinitely superior to them he really is. Perfectly despicable fellow, right? Well, not quite. He is also highly intelligent, has a gift for languages and organisation, and is extremely capable in his job; he is devoid of envy; he has a genuine appreciation of art, literature, music and, most importantly, personal charm; for all his intellectual snobbishness, he is entirely devoid of the odious, but equally sincere, admiration of the social snob for exalted positions and titles. The tragedy of Alban Torel is that he is, as the Governor told him, ''unfit by temperament'' for the rough job of District Officer - and he would not, or perhaps could not, admit this even to himself. Anne is even more complex, curious and compelling a character. She is as great an intellectual snob as her husband is, but she is far more astute in her social behaviour and therefore, quite unlike him, she is very popular in the community. She is a master of the art of social hypocrisy. But it is she who in the end recognises what kind of man Alban really is. It is she who realises that keen appreciation of art and literature and beauty are just not enough in this world; they cannot compensate for the lack of essential human virtues - like courage and compassion for instance. The chilling finale comes almost as one big speech of Anne and it is certainly among the most intense and passionate scenes ever written by Maugham. It would make a spellbinding play on the stage, as indeed would the whole story with its especially fine, sharp and dramatic dialogue.In conclusion of this rambling it is interesting to note that Alban also has his real life predecessor among the pages of ''A Writer's Notebook'', easily recognisable by his hilarious nickname Powder-Puff Percy. Yet again, though, one can appreciate how far Maugham's imagination and creativity led him from the this initial note. It was jotted down in 1929, two years before the appearance of ''The Door of Opportunity'' in magazine; Heaven knows traits from how many other people did Maugham use to make the character of Alban so coherent and believable, not to mention the equally brilliant job he did with Anne, and even the unusual vividness of such minor characters as the Governor, his wife, the planter Prynne or Captain Stratton. After reading The Door of Opportunity, judge for yourself how much of the real Powder-Puff Percy went into Alban Torel:''L. K. He is known as Powder-puff Percy. He has been a Balliol, and is much better educated and more widely read than the planters and the Government officials with whom he must spend his life. He started as a cadet and has now become a schoolmaster. He is a very good bridge-player and an excellent dancer. They complain of him that he is conceited, and he has aroused a furious antagonism in the community. He wears his clothes with a certain dash and he is a good and amusing talker in the Oxford manner. He is slangy in a smart way and at the same time cultured. He has a vocabulary of his own. He is good-looking with something of an intellectual face, and he might be a young don or a professional dancer at a night club.''If you have never read anything by Somerset Maugham, and do not have some natural aversion to the short story genre, you could hardly choose better for a first meeting with his writing than this slim volume of ten pieces selected by John Whitehead. The same is quite true for the collection ''More Far Eastern Tales'', again selected by Mr Whitehead, which contains masterpieces like ''The Letter'', ''The Outstation'', ''The Back of Beyond'', ''The Book-Bag'', ''The Yellow Streak'' and ''Flotsam and Jetsam''. It is probably safe to assume that if one doesn't like Maugham's Far Eastern short stories, he wouldn't like any of the ''European'' ones he also wrote, though the reverse case might not be so certain. Keeping the same warning in mind, it probably stands to reason to suggest that if one doesn't like Maugham's short stories, one might just as well not read his novels, travel books or essays at all. Last but not least, it must be remarked that there are no better collections of Maugham's short stories than the eight mature ones he published during his life, together with their original or written later prefaces:''The Trembling of a Leaf'' (1921; new preface for The Collected Edition, 1935). Six quite long short stories set in the South Seas: Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti.''The Casuarina Tree'' (1926, original preface The Casuarina Tree and Postscript). Six quite long short stories set in the Far East.''Ashenden'' (1928; new preface for The Collected Edition, 1934). Six spy stories set mostly in Switzerland and Russia.''First Person Singular'' (1931, original introduction without title; new preface for The Collected Edition, 1936). Six stories with European setting, mostly London but from to time Rhodes or Munchen as well.''Ah King'' (1933, original introduction; new preface for The Collected Edition, 1936). Six quite long short stories set in the Far East.''Cosmopolitans'' (1936, original Preface). 29 very short stories, written on magazine commission. Anecdotal, witty and brilliant entertainment, ranging in locales from the South Seas, through the Far East and Europe, all the way to Central America.''The Mixture as Before'' (1940, original Foreword). 10 pieces of average length. Mostly set in Europe, on the French Riviera, but with occasional leaps to London, Capri or the French penal settlement in South America.''Creatures of Circumstance'' (1947, original preface The Author Excuses Himself). 'Fifteen Tales of Far and Near Places', as the dustjacket of the First American edition states. The most diverse collection of all, as fitting for the last one. Locales range from the Far East, incidentally, through London, Italy, occupied France and a sanatorium in Scotland, to a set of three entirely 'Spanish' stories.

good book