Festival of Hungry Ghosts - Softcover

HICKLING, R.H

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9679785548 ISBN 13: 9789679785548

Publisher: Pelanduk Publications, 1997

Synopsis

Festival of Hungry Ghosts is concerned with the lives of those engaged in administering a small British Colony in the Far East. The Governor and his Councillors are brilliantly depicted as men committed to maintaining a status quo, yet inwardly aware that the phase of history they represent is fast drawing to a close.
As the story opens, the Council is meeting to consider, a scheme for the building of a new harbour, and while they are in session, news is brought to them of the murder of a District Officer. Out of these two issues arises a tense situation which involves the European, Malay and Chinese communities of the Colony, and leads to some strange alliances and intrigues. Amongst those most deeply concerned is the Colonial Secretary, Cartwright, uneasy in the changing political climate and at the same time much involved in an affair of the heart.
The setting of the novel is Sarawak. The author conveys the atmosphere of this distant country with authenticity, and his picture of colonial society in the 1950s fascinatingly reflects both the personal and professional problems of a closely-knit community, a society now so remote as to appear a dream, rather than reality. For behind the curtain of the government gazette, this is how that group of expatriates in the Sarawak Civil Service talked and behaved, surrounded by a culture few of them understood or took the trouble to understand.

About this title

About the Author

Hugh Hickling, also known as RH. Hickling, has spent most of his working life in this part of the world and has had a varied legal career. After serving in the British Navy during World War II, he practised Law in London, and then left for Sarawak in 1950 as the Assistant Attorney-General, and shortly thereafter, in 1956, became the Legal Adviser to the State of Johor. Later, he became the first Parliamentary Draftsman and Commissioner of Law Revision in the Attorney-General's Chambers in Kuala Lumpur, where he was given the unenviable task of writing and revising laws, some of them which were obsolete and many of them overlapping because they dated from times when each State was virtually sovereign and drafted its own laws.
After leaving Malaya in 1962, he has spent time in legal work in South Arabia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Gibraltar, Yemen and Fiji, as well as in teaching law at the National University of Singapore, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the University of Malaya, and the National University of Malaysia.
Hickling now lives in Malvern, England.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pelanduk Publications
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9679785548
• ISBN 13: 9789679785548
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278