BOOK REVIEW: THE ADVOCATE'S DEVIL TRILOGY BY WALTER WOON

For the uninitiated, click here to see Walter Woon’s illustrious career.

This will be a short review of The Advocate’s Devil trilogy. The three books in the trilogy are: The Advocate’s Devil, The Devil to Pay and The Devil’s Circle.

Upon finishing the first book, I quite liked it even if it was a little quaint. The protagonist in the trilogy is Peranakan lawyer Dennis Chiang who spent his formative years in an English public school and Cambridge. Thus Dennis’ voice in the book is very properly English, with all the vocabulary of an upper-class British upbringing and the slang and colloquialisms of that age (late 1930s). As mentioned at the start of this paragraph, I found the narration old-fashioned but interesting but readers accustomed to action-based and fast-paced books of today (especially of American origins) might be a little put off by it. My 16-year-old girl didn’t enjoy the book.

At the start of The Devil’s Advocate, Dennis Chiang had just returned from England and begun working at the law firm of d’Almeida & d’Almeida. The book is essentially a collection of cases encountered by Dennis Chiang, a sort of whodunnit with a legal twist. Think Enid Blyton’s Five Find-outers & Dog or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Three Investigators, but with adults attempting to solve the mystery or resolve the problem. Brisk pace of storytelling, interesting mysteries, and the added bonus of humorous writing, even if Walter Woon tends to veer towards the melodramatic at times.

Some gems of humour from the book:

The slide into genteel poverty was a common enough phenomenon among the Babas. Sometimes it was precipitated by a spendthrift wastrel son (a Baba black sheep, one might say).

Describing a lawyer who was presenting the other side in a case:

On the other side was a grizzled lawyer named K. Muthuraman. Muthuraman held himself out as a barrister and rather fancied that he was good at it. There was nothing he liked better than the sound of his own voice. He would stand in front of Judge and jury, hands clutching his robe, declaiming in flowing speeches like Olivier in ‘Hamlet’. We called him The Yeti because he was such an abominable showman.

On Dennis’ good friend Ralph, who is a veritable gentleman:

Ralph stopped abruptly. He began to get agitated. His face was white. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists. I’d never seen him quite so upset before. It was clear that some titanic oath was striving to burst forth. I waited for the eruption.

‘Blast the man!’ exclaimed Ralph.

I let out my breath and sighed inwardly. Being cursed by Ralph was not unlike being flagellated with a wet noodle.

Taken as a single book, I would have rated The Advocate’s Devil above average. However, when you take the trilogy into consideration, things get a lot more iffy.

The problem I have with the trilogy is that I find the books a little schizophrenic. The Advocate’s Devil, I’ve already mentioned, is written as a potboiler mystery, not unlike those penned by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Funny, zippy-paced and loaded with descriptions of pre-war Singapore, I like.

The Devil to Pay is set during the war itself. So it’s structured more like a spy thriller in the first part of the book. Dennis Chiang and Clarence d’Almeida, the senior partner of the law firm Dennis was working in, went undercover in a British airbase in Malaya to try to uncover the culprit who was trying to subvert the Indian soldiers. Then halfway through the book, war broke out and the tone of the narration turned into that of a war epic. It was rather jarring.

The last book, The Devil’s Circle, deals with the aftermath of the war. War criminals had to be tried, Singapore had to be rebuilt, and the locals (or ‘natives’ as they were called in those days) had to deal with the withdrawal of the Japanese and the return of the British. But they were disillusioned by the British’s performance during the war and the writing was on the wall, where independence was concerned.

There is no dispute that Walter Woon has got a fine command of the English language. What I find confusing though is the non-consistency of the books’ structure. In fictional series, the structure of the books always remains the same, and for good reason. It is for the sake of continuation. That’s why the books form series!

Think JK Rowling’s Harry Potter — always school-based adventures, even as the danger and tension escalated book after book; only in the seventh book did the setting take place outside the school (the children were on the run), but even then, the tone was the same as the earlier six books’. Think JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy — consistent tone and structure. Or Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl’s series — always about the police-and-criminal partnership between Holly and Fowl. Ditto Darren Shan’s Demonata and vampire series. Ditto Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series.

The point I’m trying to make is that the tone of the narration and, to a certain extent, the genre of the series should remain consistent to avoid confusion in the reader, which is certainly what I suffered from by the time I finished the trilogy. I had no idea what I had just read. After finishing the first book, I had thought it was going to be about a collection of legal cases, which was obviously not the case by the time I embarked on the second book, which had only two or three such cases. The rest of the book revolved around the cloak-and-dagger business and the invasion of Singapore and Malaya by the Japanese.

If you want to read the series, I would advise thinking of each of them as a stand-alone book, so that you don’t get as disoriented as I did.

What I liked about the books:

Walter Woon’s so-correct Britishisms, his humour, his rather detailed portrayal of colonial Singapore. You also learn a bit about the law. Not enough to make you a legal expert, but you’ll learn some interesting facts that you did not know before (unless you’re a lawyer). And if you’re into Perankan culture, you’ll like the cultural titbits that he sprinkled liberally throughout the books.

What I didn’t like:

The romance was so off. It’s true, you know. Guys can’t write romance. A good romance makes you melt and root for the couple. Totally didn’t happen here.

I already mentioned the biggest problem for me: the change in genre and tone was too jarring.

Lastly, there were quite a few mistakes in the books. Grammatical errors and missing words. This I fault the publisher, who should have engaged a more proficient editor. I expected better from an established publisher like Marshall Cavendish.