Literary Notes: 'When in Singapore, feed at Raffles.' It was a good piece of marketing for the hotel by Rudyard Kipling, who came to Singapore after leaving India in 1889. In fact, Kipling spoke of 'a place called Raffles Hotel, where the food is as excellent as the rooms are bad'.
Raffles has, for over a century, been fertile writing ground for many authors, including Hermann Hesse, Joseph Conrad, Noel Coward, Somerset Maugham and James Michener - and in their honour the Writer's Bar was named. More than any other, Somerset Maugham sought inspiration on several visits to the island. His short stories of Singaporean colonial life include The Outstation, Yellow Streak, The Casuarina Tree (1926), and the controversial The Letter (1927), about the real-life murder of her lover by a rubber planter's wife.
More recently, Singapore's story is told through the man mainly responsible for its success; the former Prime Minister and now Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, grandson of a Hakka coolie from China. His memoirs From Third World to First - The Singapore Story: 1965-2000 (2000) recount the events leading up to Singapore's Independence, from British colonial rule through Japanese occupation and Communist insurrection. Defending the Lion City (2000) by Tim Huxley is the first-ever major study of the Singapore Armed Forces and analyses its military strategy, outlook and policies.
Prominent contemporary Singaporean novelists include Hwee Hwee Tan, whose Foreign Bodies: A Novel (1999) tells of an authoritarian state in which three rootless friends become implicated in an international soccer gambling syndicate. Mammon Inc. (2001), her latest novel, is a cutting satire of our times. A very different Singapore is portrayed in Catherine Lim's The Bondmaid (1997), set in the 1950s, which paints a picture of a Singapore entwined with its Chinese roots, traditions and beliefs. Two popular recent reads are Got Singapore (2002), a collection of articles and stories by journalist Richard Lim, with a personal and humorous testimony about his experiences from the 1960s to the 1980s. In Notes from an Even Smaller Island (2002), Neil Humphreys dissects the culture and lifestyle of Singapore from an expat's viewpoint. Set in Singapore during WWII, The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell (2005) tells of a city under siege, and the trials and tribulations of the very British and powerful Walter Blackett. This is the final novel in Farrell's ‘Empire Trilogy'.