The Titanic in a Singaporean Imagination

Review of Daniel Yeo’s The Impermanence of Lilies (Singapore: Ethos Books, 2019)
By Priscilla King

The sinking of the Titanic, a massive British ship whose builders had believed it would be “unsinkable,” was the biggest news story of its day. At least two of the American songs written about it had been preserved as “folk classics” long before James Cameron’s movie made Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet famous. The shock of the ship’s collision with the iceberg and its sinking, the hubris of its builders who had under-supplied lifeboats, the heartbreaking but right choice to allot these seats to women and children first, and the way the survivors hoped their captain might have survived, captured imaginations around the world. The Impermanence of Lilies by Daniel Yeo is a speculative novel about the legend of the Titanic as it survives in the Singaporean imagination.

Ted (based loosely on the real Captain Edward Smith) is the narrator of this tale. Never a writer in official records, he develops a gift for storytelling in a second life in Yeo’s hands. What he remembers and writes down includes minor anachronisms and random errors (Does his first life end on the 12th of April, 1912, or on the 15th of April, 1915? Would a Staffordshire man say “much trivialities”? Would a man forget having been a father?) but these are overshadowed by his wit and insights. I’m convinced that I’m hearing a twenty-first century man’s “voice,” and can believe that he’s mis-remembering things that happened in the nineteenth and twentieth century, in the manner that people do remember the distant past, mixing current insights into old memories.

For the most part, the protagonist’s unreliability works, though perhaps in a different way from how Yeo intended. Before 1999 I would probably have doubted that even a reincarnated narrator could forget when he died. In 1999, I received a letter from someone born in 1973 who claimed to remember something going on for 27 years. I think of David Myers’ teachings on the self-serving bias and the unreliability of memory. Like Ted, we are all unreliable narrators of our lives. Regardless, the captain of the Titanic comes off as a sincere, idealistic young man with talent. He is also an extreme introvert. Perhaps the memoirs of real Victorian Englishmen influenced Yeo’s characterization of Ted. Ted’s writing recalls landscapes and butterflies in vivid detail, and entire conversations as exchanges of stock phrases.

To begin with, Yeo has his protagonist describe his childhood and adolescence. According to these childhood memories, Ted attended a school “made to keep children safe from learning on their own.” What he was taught, along with the curious Victorian notion that people learn things by being beaten, was the adage, “Women and Children First.” Ships in those days were still prone to wreck. Captains made sure the women and children got into lifeboats first, then the gentlemen passengers, then the sailors. If not rescued, captains went down with the ship. Victorians, more concerned about frivolity than about depression, encouraged children to read and write about the heroic deaths of brave captains. These moments of dramatic foreshadowing help us understand the captain’s motivations on that fateful day; they also act as an explanation for what led him to sail the high seas.

Ted was originally expected to inherit a pottery business in England. Not keen on pottery, Ted chooses to run off, leaving his father behind. He takes with him not the picture of his long-dead mother (which his father would have preferred to keep), but an odd little painting of a white lily that a seafaring uncle brought back from Japan. Ted calls the painted lily “she” and projects odd fancies onto the way it looks under different lights. His attachment to the painting seems to outweigh anything he feels for his shipmates, whose skin tones vary but who are “united by the colour of our language.” For him, the flower expresses the most general symbolic meaning of all flowers—Romantic Love—although he is not a very romantic man. He marries, but although he and his wife like each other, he spends most of his time at sea; the couple have no children. This is a divergence from historical events: the real Captain and Mrs. Smith had a daughter. Yet, it is details like these that shape Yeo’s story.

Yeo has some fun with the genre of historical fiction. Reading what one Charles Darwin had to say about Callao, which Ted likes, Ted retorts that he disagrees with Darwin enough to feel “less disposed to any other theory he might have, as well.” Ted just misses the great earthquake in San Francisco and the great typhoon in Hong Kong when he visits those cities, but he fancies that he sees white lilies in the ashes of the Krakatoa eruption. In Japan he makes a friend named Kiichi, learns the language, and hears a local legend about the brutal warlord, Nobunaga. Nobunaga took a painter prisoner and demanded that she paint an image of the warlord’s legacy. The painter painted an orange lily in a way that, on closer examination, revealed bleeding bodies and burning towns. Nobunaga ordered the painter and all her paintings to be burned, and so, of course, the people cherished the memory of the artist. The narration of histories beyond what we consider the relevant details of the tragedy of the Titanic allows us to see Ted respond to the events of his times and of other places.

When he sails out as captain on the Titanic, the glass over Ted’s white lily cracks, a foreboding portent. I had initially thought that Yeo relied on one of the theories of how Captain Smith might have survived. Yeo does not: Ted’s narrative continues past the sinking, but now he speaks as a ghost. I personally prefer historical fiction that sticks to the facts about real people, but after this turning point the rest of the novel is historical fantasy. Ted first returns to his wife to try and spend time with her, although she cannot see him. When she does not join him in death, Ted drifts about having amusing little adventures. People claim to have seen him, or even to have been him, the way a subsequent generation did after the death of Elvis Presley, whom Ted wishes he could have met. He goes back to Japan, and finds out that his old friend Kiichi can see him. They settle down in rural areas outside Hiroshima, and there Ted meets a female painter who can also see him. Like him, she is dead. They soon realize that the painted lily that Ted owned was painted by her. Ted names her Sayuri, after the flower he loves.

Lilies are not the only symbolic flowers in the novel. Other flowers from old “language of flowers” books also appear, and are utilized by a wide range of characters. The symbolism of flowers appealed to both the Victorians and the Japanese. Some cultural meanings even overlapped. In The Impermanence of Lilies, we’re told that lilacs symbolize “confidence and innocence,” springtime, and also “first love.” Ted’s wife asked for a lilac bush in the hope that confidence would replace her innocence; Sayuri’s father planted lilacs in celebration of his daughter’s birth, and also out of respect for his first (and only) wife. Cherry blossoms, of course, symbolize the impermanence of perfection. Chrysanthemums could have other meanings in Europe, but the Japanese chrysanthemum in The Impermanence of Lilies symbolizes courage in battle, manliness, and heroism, whereas white chrysanthemum symbolizes grief, lamentation, and the consequences of battle. Sayuri, who grew up as a painter, painted her first white chrysanthemum in memory of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sayuri’s memory of this event is sketched in beautiful, restrained prose:

The sun glowed strangely red in that sky, an unusual sun for another day. An answer appeared. A white line of chalk drawing across the board, entering from the edge of the sky beyond my sight […] From it, descended two white objects like floating umbrellas, attached to something we could not make out from the distance […] From it, unsheathed a blade of light that cleaved the sky. A tremendous white, whiter than I ever knew white could be. Whiter than the white of old men, the white of eyeballs, and the white of murdered bones. It sliced from east to west, from the city towards the hills, the sky torn open to unleash the sun.”

Crafted with an eye for color and composition, the tools of her artistic medium, Sayuri’s recollection portrays the sky as a canvas to describe the destruction caused by the atomic bombs, as they “tore open” reality. Likewise, her shades of white gradually move from childlike to eerie: “white line of chalk,” “floating umbrellas,” “old men,” and finally “murdered bones.” The unfolding destruction is as beautifully rendered as it is heartbreaking.

This scene encapsulates Yeo’s approach to his novel. Yes, he situates a love story within his retelling of the Titanic, but Sayuri and Ted are both witnesses to great tragedies. Their love emphasizes how short life is, at best, and how horrible war is. We’re meant to hold onto those thoughts. The Impermanence of Lilies pays just enough attention to young love to keep its larger message, of humankind’s need for peace, from becoming overwhelming. Whether or not the historical fantasy works is up to the reader. How would I feel about a man who speaks to other people only in stock phrases, addressing all his thoughts just to one person? If I were Sayuri, I’d believe the reincarnation of Ted Smith is sincere, talented, and not as well prepared to make a commitment as he thinks.

Meanwhile, the cultural mixing of Victorian England, modern Japan, and contemporary England is largely successful. Multicultural enrichment was part of the glamor of a seafaring life; if the real Captain Smith was not drawn to Japan, the writer Lafcadio Hearn certainly was, as were many others from the West. Though Yeo’s protagonist is not a Buddhist, his novel is a thoroughly Buddhist romance. For a long section of the story, the main characters are caught between different lives. Being ghosts, they are bound to the world of living people because living people remember them. One of them rarely speaks aloud, and one never does. Better novels than this one have been written. In the future Yeo will probably write some of them. Given the controversial, speculative quality of the material he’s chosen, I think he’s done a good job. The Impermanence of Lilies was a fun read.


Priscilla King is a writer, bookseller, and online activist in Gate City, Virginia.