The eccentric Mr Hare - as he was known to Sophia, the first wife of
Singapore founder Thomas Stamford Raffles - and his Asian harem are
brought vividly to life in this work of historical fiction set in
Southeast Asia. Arthur Grimsby is an ageing expat in 1960s Singapore.
Museum curator, ornithologist, freshly bereaved, he fears Singapore's
looming independence and his redundancy and tries to complete one final
piece of work: the life story of an eccentric 19th-century Englishman
called Alexander Hare. Hare was a trader and slave-owner in the East and
a friend of Thomas Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant Governor of Java and the
founder of Singapore, but Hare's chief claim to fame is as the creator
of an Asian harem, including in his collection women from Java, Bali,
Sumatra, Sulawesi, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, China, India and Africa.
Hare's love of women and his assembling of a harem, initially in Borneo
and then on an uninhabited atoll that would become the Cocos-Keeling
Islands, made him an object of guilty male fantasies and of strident
female resentments, the epitome of masculine, colonial exploitation. But
Arthur Grimsby's paths are no straighter than Alexander Hare's and the
two grow together as their destinies intertwine.
