Time for a Tiger
Encyclopedia
Time for a Tiger is part one of Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson  – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...

's Malayan Trilogy The Long Day Wanes
The Long Day Wanes
The Long Day Wanes: A Malayan Trilogy, also published as The Malayan Trilogy, is Anthony Burgess's novel cycle about the withdrawal from empire....

, "the first panel of a triptych
Triptych
A triptych , from tri-= "three" + ptysso= "to fold") is a work of art which is divided into three sections, or three carved panels which are hinged together and can be folded shut or displayed open. It is therefore a type of polyptych, the term for all multi-panel works...

" set in the twilight of British rule of the peninsula.

Dedicated, in Jawi script on the first page of the book, "to all my Malayan friends" ("Kepada sahabat-sahabat saya di Tanah Melayu"), it was Burgess's first published work of fiction and appeared in 1956.

The title alludes to an advertising slogan for Tiger beer, then, as now, popular in the Malay peninsula.

The action centres on the vicissitudes of Victor Crabbe, a history teacher at an elite school for all the peninsula's ethnic groups – Malay, Chinese and Indian the Mansor School, in Kuala Hantu (modelled on the Malay College at Kuala Kangsar
Kuala Kangsar
Kuala Kangsar is the royal town of Perak, Malaysia, located at the downstream of Kangsar River, where it flows into the Perak River. It is the main town in the administrative district of Kuala Kangsar.-History:...

, Perak).

Characters and plot

Victor Crabbe, a resident teacher at the Mansor School, seeks to tackle the threat posed by a boy Communist who appears to be conducting clandestine night-time indoctrination sessions with fellow students. But the headmaster, Boothby, scoffs at Crabbe's warnings.

Nabby Adams, an alcoholic police lieutenant who prefers warm beer ("he could not abide it cold"), persuades Crabbe to buy a car, enabling Adams to make a commission as a middleman. This is despite the fact that Crabbe will not drive because of a traumatic car accident in which his first wife died and he was the driver.

Crabbe's marriage to the blonde Fenella is crumbling, while he carries on an affair with a Malay divorcee employed at a nightclub. A junior police officer who works for Adams, Alladad Khan, (who has a secret crush on Fenella) moonlights as a driver for the couple. Ibrahim bin Mohamed Salleh, a (married) gay cook, works for the couple but is being pursued by the wife he has fled from after being forced to marry her by his family.

The threads of the plot come together when Alladad Khan drives Crabbe, Fenella and Adams to a nearby village, along a route where they face possible ambush by Chinese terrorists. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they return late to the school's speech day and an unexpected chain of events follows that transforms the lives of all the main characters.
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