The Crocodile Fury by Beth Yahp (Angus & Robertson)

The Crocodile Fury is Beth Yahp’s first novel and is set in her native Malaysia. It is the story of three generations of women - the grandmother who was a bonded-servant to a rich man and worked at his mansion before it was converted into a convent, the mother who works in the convent’s laundry room, and the girl who narrates the story. 

The narrator has spent most of her life in the convent. “The convent is on a hill on the edge of the city, next to a jungle reserve which swallows and spits out trucks full of soldiers every day.” This is where the narrator begins her story. She also talks about the tribe of monkeys led by a one-armed bandit who often leads raids into the kitchen of the convent to steal food. 

It is the convent where the parents of the wealthy and the poor send their girls. “Young girls are brought in who are too noisy or boisterous or too bossy or unladylike or too disobedient or worldly, or merely too hard to look at, or feed.” The homely girls are taught to sew and weave while the noisy, boisterous girls are taught to become honest, obedient and humble young ladies. 

The narrator is a charity student. The narrator was raised mostly by her grandmother. She tells us that her grandmother believes in ghosts and demons.  “She is old now, so sometimes she mixes them up. When she was younger she had an extra eye.” When the narrator asks her grandmother, “Where? Where?” Her grandmother tells her she can never be sure. Her grandmother’s extra eye “suddenly opened when she was hit on the head with a frying-pan ladle.” This gave her the power to see the demons and spirits and the ability to talk to the dead. 

Yahp’s prose flows smoothly and is a delight to read as she makes the jungle surrounding the convent come alive but the story itself goes all over the place. At times, it is very difficult to follow as the narrator will talk about her grandmother, then her mother, then about herself and back to her mother or grandmother making it hard to follow the chronology of events. It is also difficult to feel any empathy towards the characters. 

The grandmother comes off as demanding and unforgiving. The narrator with her repetitious pronouncements about her mother “before she was a Christian” was irritating at best. In fact, all the characters seem to be caricatures of people as none of them are given any names. They are only known as grandmother, mother, the bully, the rich man, the lover, the lizard boy and so on. 

The story is told with a blend of spiritualism, mysticism and the mundane so you can never be sure if the narrator is telling a true story or is just remembering a dream she had or a vision her grandmother saw. 

And the “crocodile fury”? The crocodile is a metaphor for man and his hunger to satisfy his lust for power and love. The fury is when the “crocodiles” cannot contain their own anger. All in all, the descriptive depiction of the convent and the characters that pass through there make for a story that is at once confusing and beautiful at the same time. ~Ernie Hoyt