''The Monkey King'' is the debut novel of

Timothy Mo Timothy Peter Mo (born 30December 1950) is a British Asian novelist. Born to a British mother and a Hong Kong father, Mo lived in Hong Kong until the age of 10, when he moved to Britain. Educated at Mill Hill School and St John's College, Oxfor ...

, originally published in London in 1978 by

André Deutsch André Deutsch (15 November 1917 – 11 April 2000) was a Hungarian-born British publisher who founded an eponymous publishing company in 1951. Biography Deutsch was born on 15 November 1917 in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a Jewish dentis ...

. It was subsequently released through other UK and US publishers – including

Faber & Faber Faber and Faber Limited, usually abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in London. Published authors and poets include T. S. Eliot (an early Faber editor and director), W. H. Auden, Margaret Storey, William Golding, Samuel B ...

(paperback 1978),

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...

(hardcover 1978),

Random House Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...

/ Doubleday hardcover (1980),

Vintage Vintage, in winemaking, is the process of picking grapes and creating the finished product—wine (see Harvest (wine)). A vintage wine is one made from grapes that were all, or primarily, grown and harvested in a single specified year. In certa ...

(softcover, 1993) – before being

self-published Self-publishing is the publication of media by its author at their own cost, without the involvement of a publisher. The term usually refers to written media, such as books and magazines, either as an ebook or as a physical copy using POD (pri ...

by the author under the Paddleless Press imprint in 2000. Comic and ironic in style, the novel was chosen by

Hilary Bailey Hilary Bailey (19 September 1936 – 19 January 2017) was a British writer, critic and editor. Life Bailey attended Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was a founder-member of the Cambridge University Women's Union. She was born in Brom ...

of the New Fiction Society and won the

Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize is a British literary prize established in 1963 in tribute to Geoffrey Faber, founder and first Chairman of the publisher Faber & Faber. It recognises a single volume of poetry or fiction by a United Kingdom, Irish ...

in 1979.Timothy Mo
"SECOND THOUGHTS / File under nuts: Timothy Mo on his first novel, The Monkey King"
''The Independent'', 7 May 1993. A 10-part abridgement of the novel (by

Margaret Busby Margaret Yvonne Busby, , Hon. FRSL (born 1944), also known as Nana Akua Ackon, is a Ghanaian-born publisher, editor, writer and broadcaster, resident in the UK. She was Britain's youngest and first black female book publisherJazzmine Breary"Let' ...

) was broadcast on

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...

's ''

Book at Bedtime ''Book at Bedtime'' (''A Book at Bedtime'' until 9 July 1993) is a long-running radio programme that is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 each weekday evening between 22.45 and 23.00. The programme presents readings of fiction, including modern classics, ...

'' in 1997, from 23 June to 4 July, read by

David Yip David Nicholas Yip (; born 4 June 1951) is a British actor of Chinese and English descent. He gained prominence through his lead role in the BBC series ''The Chinese Detective''. Early life Yip was born in Liverpool to a Chinese father, a seama ...

Synopsis

''The Monkey King'' follows the humorous exploits of

protagonist A protagonist () is the main character of a story. The protagonist makes key decisions that affect the plot, primarily influencing the story and propelling it forward, and is often the character who faces the most significant obstacles. If a st ...

Wallace Nolasco, who finds himself in financial straits after being denied his

dowry A dowry is a payment, such as property or money, paid by the bride's family to the groom or his family at the time of marriage. Dowry contrasts with the related concepts of bride price and dower. While bride price or bride service is a payment b ...

in hectic

post-war In Western usage, the phrase post-war era (or postwar era) usually refers to the time since the end of World War II. More broadly, a post-war period (or postwar period) is the interval immediately following the end of a war. A post-war period c ...

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

, and must by guile better both himself and the moribund reputation of the Chinese house he has

married Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, is a culturally and often legally recognized union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children, and between t ...

into. The plot of ''The Monkey King'', which is a family saga, divided into three sections, is driven by the tensions between Wallace and his father-in-law, the patriarchal Mr Poon.

Background

In 1993, Mo wrote in ''

The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...

'':

"The only easy thing about my first novel was traditionally the hardest part, getting it published. Less than a fortnight after delivering the manuscript in May 1977 I received a charming letter of acceptance from
Diana Athill Diana Athill (21 December 1917 – 23 January 2019) was a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the greatest writers of the 20th century at the London-based publishing company Andre Deutsch Ltd. Early life ...
of Andre Deutsch, the editor of
Jean Rhys Jean Rhys, ( ; born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her ...
and
V S Naipaul Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (; 17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienati ...
, no less. I was 26.... Looking back on The Monkey King is as painful and farcical as looking back on first love. ...The
South China Morning Post The ''South China Morning Post'' (''SCMP''), with its Sunday edition, the ''Sunday Morning Post'', is a Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper owned by Alibaba Group. Founded in 1903 by Tse Tsan-tai and Alfred Cunningham, it has remained ...
said The Monkey King was 'so bad it should never have been published'; with the headline 'File under nuts'. ...The Jamaican Sunday Gleaner noted that the book beggared description, was full of unintentionally funny passages, and altogether inferior to ' The House of Mr Biswas' (sic) by Naipaul.... It had been monstrously difficult to write.... But ... I've never brought off anything as funny or as sharply characterised as those early scenes from The Monkey King again, nor will I....And Miss Athill still thinks it's my best book.

Mo's novel evoked comparisons with the 16th-century classical Chinese work ''

Journey to the West ''Journey to the West'' () is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en. It is regarded as one of the greatest Classic Chinese Novels, and has been described as arguably the most popu ...

'', and the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

'' reviewer observed that, "like its illustrious forebear, this 20th-Century tale is at turns comic and serious, sympathetic and cruel, and certainly never dull."

Awards

''The Monkey King'' was awarded the

in 1979."Timothy Mo"

British Council The British Council is a British organisation specialising in international cultural and educational opportunities. It works in over 100 countries: promoting a wider knowledge of the United Kingdom and the English language (and the Welsh lan ...

, Literature.

References

External links

"The Monkey King (1978)"
Fantastic Fiction. * Elaine Yee Lin Ho
"'The Chinese Family at Home: The Monkey King'
in *Timothy Mo*. Manchester University Press. 2000. 29-49. {{DEFAULTSORT:Monkey King, The 1978 novels Postcolonial novels Novels set in Hong Kong Fiction set in 1978 Works based on Journey to the West 1978 debut novels André Deutsch books