Friends reunited: Ponti & Falling Leaves

There seems to be a chain of connections between my reviews so far this month; either of these novels, but especially the first, could have been paired At Dusk. Although the school friends in Ponti aren’t reunited until late in the novel while, in Falling Leaves it’s towards the beginning and after a gap of only seven years, the resonance is perhaps equally strong. And, no, they didn’t make contact through a now-defunct social media site, nor at a school reunion, but you’ll have to read on to find out how.

Ponti by Sharlene Teo

Amisa is seventeen in 1975 when she leaves her home and family in the poverty of rural Malaysia for the bright lights of Singapore. Befriended by an older woman who works as a medium in the shabby room next door, Amisa gets up before dawn for her shift at the fish market. When she takes a second job at a cinema, little does she know that not only will she meet her future husband there, she’ll see her own face staring down one day from the screen.
 
In 2003, Szu is a lonely convent-school student, living with her sickly mother and a woman she takes to be her aunt. In the rundown bungalow bought with her long-departed father’s lottery winnings, the women operate a spiritual business linking the bereaved with the dead. Now sixteen, life is about to change for Szu: although she’ll make a friend, she’ll suffer a bereavement of her own.
 
Circe is an advertising executive in the very near future, brought low by a tapeworm and a protracted divorce, when a new project reunites her with her past. A film studio is to release a remake of an obscure 70s horror series, ‘Ponti’, based on the Malaysian legend of the Pontianak, a beautiful female vampire-figure feeding on the flesh of men. Had she not been friends with Szu at school, Circe might never have been aware of the original. But the girl had been fiercely proud of her mother Amisa’s role.
 
Narrated from the points of view of each of the three women, Sharlene Teo’s debut novel is a story of female friendship, mothers and daughters, and an Asian society undergoing rapid change. I can’t recall having read any other novels set in Singapore, but Szu’s chapters in particular evoke the suffocating pollution, humidity and equatorial heat. Although I wasn’t altogether satisfied with the resolution, I enjoyed the read, courtesy of publishers Picador.

Falling Leaves by Stefan Mohamed

A couple of years after graduating from her journalism course, Vanessa is living in London, working at a cinema, in the process of separating from her live-in boyfriend and trying, and failing, to write. When she awakes, crying, from a vivid dream, she’s no idea what it means. Soon after, she’s having visual hallucinations of a young woman who looks just like her, except that her hair isn’t purple but black.
 
If that’s not weird enough, she gets a call from her aunt saying Mark, Vanessa’s best friend from childhood, has turned up, seven years after disappearing without a trace. Shocked and confused, Vanessa takes the train to their home town in Wales. Sure enough, it’s Mark who is not only unable to account for the missing years but he’s still sixteen.
 
Before they can make sense of the situation, Mark’s life is endangered and the pair go on the run. But can things really be that serious and is Vanessa enough of a grown-up to give him the support and protection he needs?
 
You know a book’s going to be weird when the blurb reads
 
Seven years ago, Vanessa’s best friend Mark vanished without a trace. Now he’s back, not a day older, as though no time has passed.
 
But you never quite know how weird. While I couldn’t much relate to the eventual explanation for Mark’s disappearance, Falling Leaves is a page-turning adventure story about marginalised identities and the gulf between the early and late stages of adolescence. Thanks to Salt for my review copy.

Catch me reading “Ghost Girl”, a flash fiction piece about an adolescent with a marginalised identity, taken from my anthology, Becoming Someone.