Word: blackett
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...ensure Blackett & Webb is passed off safely to an heir, Blackett does what any exasperated patriarch would do: he tries to fix his daughter's marriage. But the groom whom Blackett zeroes in on, Matthew Webb, the Oxford-educated son of his business partner, eventually proves to be not so suitable after all. Webb is the opposite of Blackett. A soft-hearted pacifist who once worked for the League of Nations, he arrives in Singapore and promptly begins to wander away from Walter's zealously charted course by getting involved with a beautiful Chinese refugee and exploring the teeming districts...
...Farrell's pungent aroma still fleetingly hovers over today's city, once you escape its air-conditioned malls, but it was more powerful in the late 1930s, when the novel is set. The story sprawls around the family of Walter Blackett, a wealthy British businessman who is clinging, with increasingly comic desperation, to the old colonial order as his beloved city lurches toward World War II. Around the bungalows of Tanglin his tempestuous daughter is conducting love affairs with variously unsuitable men, his son is proving too unreliable to inherit the family firm Blackett & Webb, and his business partner, once...
...Through these two characters, posh and seamy prewar Singapore come simultaneously alive. A contemporary tour of Singapore shows how Blackett's world, and to a great extent Webb's, are still around. Tanglin is where the moneyed still live, in jungle-shrouded black-and-white bungalows. The "marmoreal banks" of Collyer Quay are there too, even if their employees no longer take mid-morning tiffin or quit for a game of tennis in the late afternoon, as Blackett did. So is the Cricket Club, where around the teak-paneled bar titans of business are becalmed by an early evening beer...
...Farrell's characters survive in spirit, too. Misfits like Webb still wander into Singapore, and though firms like Blackett's have ceded to local conglomerates, his penchant for order and profit can still be witnessed within today's business élite. With his gentle wit Farrell captures the soul of Singapore: a polyglot Asian port, still partly under the sleepy sway of its British colonial past, and still lurching toward an uncertain future with a furious, irresistible energy...
...early hours of August 2, 1943, the American patrol torpedo boat PT 109, skippered by John F. Kennedy, was running slowly on one engine - to avoid detection - in the Blackett Strait, off Kolombangara Island. Its mission, like that of other PT boats, was to harass a fast-moving convoy of Japanese supply ships. On a moonless night, with little warning, Kennedy's 25-m wooden boat was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. PT 109 burst into flames, two men were killed, and the 11 surviving crew members had to abandon the boat. Four hours later, after swimming almost...