Although failing to solve the mysteries intrinsic to feng shui, Nury Vittachi’s best known book, The Feng Shui Detective (2000, Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 313 pages), delivers ample entertainment.
Evidently, feng shui, an ancient Chinese system of positioning objects to enhance energy flows, becomes a mighty sleuthing tool if practised properly at crime scenes. Like an Asian version of Sherlock Holmes, the seasoned Singapore-based feng shui detective C.F. Wong deciphers clues that mere mortals miss.
The book opens as Wong reluctantly engages a skeptical teenager, Joyce McQuinnie, as his assistant. Then there’s a series of adventures ranging from “The Lion’s Share” to “Ghost in the Machine” and “An Imperfect Enclosure”, mostly more lively and dangerous than the young sidekick wishes.
Vittachi cleverly widens his appeal by sending the two protagonists on road trips to solve mysteries in regional cities. Building on this book’s success, he later wrote The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (2002) and The Feng Shui Detective’s Casebook (2003).
Impressively prolific, Vittachi has written almost two-dozen books, many for children. His best fiction includes Asian Values (1996), about an Asian businessman and a Western feminist handcuffed together for 24 hours as a fundraising stunt. For young readers, he delivered the likes of Ludwig and the Chewy Chunks Café (1995), Dead Eric Gets a Virus (2002) and The True History of Santa Claus (2003). In years past, he wrote a popular newspaper column for the South China Morning Post.
In The Fung Shui Detective, wry humor prevails. “The neighborhood was temporarily woken at seven o’clock by a minor emergency: a small fire in the building opposite apparently caused by a joss stick falling out of a shrine dedicated to the God of Safety, according to the watchman. Sirens shook the buildings until a fireman arrived to find an elderly Buddhist nun had stamped out the fire with her bare feet – hard calloused hooves which were quite undamaged by the harsh usage.”
Vittachi shows a knack for dialogue: “It’s kind of a law in American movies. Old ones. You had to have a switcheroo. One bag with valuable stuff and another bag which looks the same, only has junk in it. The bag gets switched. They still have it sometimes. Dumb and Dumber.”
“Yes. American moves dumber and dumber.”
Victims of disappointing books could do worse than to engage the services of C.F. Wong. The Feng Shui Detective makes an agreeable reading companion.
Approval rating: 71 per cent.
For more information: www.chameleonpress.com/nury/
(February 5, 2007)
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Nury Vittachi: humor in print.
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