Mackerel: Could you summarise After the Inquiry for us?
Jolene Tan: After the Inquiry is a whodunnit with a bureaucratic twist. A police officer lies in a coma following a gunshot to the head, which looks like an open-and-shut case of Russian Roulette gone wrong. But civil servant Teck is tasked with taking a second look, and with the help of his earnest assistant Nithya, he writes his findings up. With footnotes.
M: What gave you the idea for the novel?
JT: The seed crystal is from Teo You Yenn’s book on inequality, where she writes, “Once we see, we cannot, must not, unsee.” I was particularly struck by this because in my experience, our society has a powerful interlocking set of mechanisms for collective unseeing. So I was reading her book and flipping back and forth to check footnotes, and all at once the core idea came to me, of an ambitious bureaucrat who trades in a kind of specious facticity. Cases of NSFs facing hazing or pressure were also on my mind for some time—the drowning of SCDF Corporal Kok Yuen Chin, the death by heat stroke of Corporal First Class Dave Lee—and this influenced my thinking about plot.
M: Would you say this is a genre novel or something more literary? Who is your target audience?
JT: It’s a literary novel which borrows genre trappings. I’d say it’s for readers who enjoy something satisfyingly plotty, but are open to playing just a little with form, and are broadly interested in society and politics. It helps if you like a small touch of farce.
M: For a police (sort of) procedural, the action seems to be mostly in retrospect. Are you worried that this could affect the pace of the story?
I trust readers to understand when a spring is winding up for the pay-off. I think it's also quickly apparent there's another story going on in parallel to the formal investigation—readers are engaging in a psychological investigation alongside the bureaucratic one—and suspense comes in part from the relationship between the two.
M: Would you say that Teck as the narrator personifies Singapore’s particular brand of bureaucracy and do you think readers would recognise that?
JT: Teck is foremost an individual character; his most intense oddities belong to him alone. Aspects of his views will certainly be especially familiar to Singaporeans. At the same time, the conniving bureaucrat has a global family tree—think Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes Minister—and I’m also interested in how the roles of officials and spin doctors are increasingly intertwined, both in Singapore and beyond. Ministries post memes! What’s up with that?
M: Was it difficult to write such an unlikeable narrator, one so devoid of empathy?
JT: But is Teck devoid of empathy? Or is empathy uselessly adrift within a fragmented individual? Teck is partly inspired by Henry Crawford of Mansfield Park, who reads others to play-act to them, and it’s ambiguous how far this reading and acting can reach into his self. I was drawn to the technical challenge of unsympathetic narrators: think Kazuo Ishiguro’s Masuji Ono, Sarah Waters’ Dr Faraday, of course Vladimir Nabokov. The reader has access only to the narrator’s reports, and yet the reader must and will see more than the narrator sees. That was really interesting and fun to write.
M: Are the use of footnotes, the long internal monologues and the verbose dialogue intended to frustrate the reader? (Because I was very frustrated!)
JT: Teck’s mode of communication is frustrating, I’d suggest, as much of Singapore’s dominant narrative is frustrating: telling you what to think, mistaking snooty syllogism and formal documentation for the hallmarks of correctness, presenting prejudice as fact. Singaporeans spend a lot of energy trying to read tea leaves, peer between the lines, understand subtext—in this book, this must be done literally.
M: Familiar stereotypes of race, class and, to some extent, sexuality seem to be reinforced in the novel. Is your overall message one of being realistic or are you hopeful of systemic change?
JT: The novel contains some characters who espouse stereotypes, but I think that’s a very different matter from a book itself reinforcing stereotypes. I don’t believe that it does the latter—my goal is always to avoid that.
M: What are the risks and rewards for you in writing this novel?
JT: It’s a much plottier and formally more sophisticated affair than my first novel, which was more purely relationship-driven. I enjoyed this shift tremendously, but it meant a new kind of planning. I also had to do quite a bit of research, talking to cops and bureaucrats. I wasn’t aiming for a perfectly factual depiction of either milieu, but there’s a certain level of realism you need to make a story work.
M: Any plans for a follow-up novel with any of these characters?
JT: Not just yet, though I’ve had multiple requests for a Nithya spin-off! I suspect whatever comes next will be big. This novel was zooming in, striving for a kind of miniaturised clarity. I’m thinking now about sprawling out. We’ll see.
