Delayed Rays of a Star

Amanda Lee Koe

Bloomsbury

Otago Daily Times, August 24th 2019

Amanda Lee Koe’s award-winning debut novel opens with the momentary conjunction of cinematic starlight: a photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt of Marlene Detrich, Leni Riefenstahl, and Anna May Wong standing arm in arm against a gilt-framed mirror at the 1928 Berlin Press Ball. Although lacking the iconic status of later works such as The Kiss, Eisenstaedt’s image of two of Germany’s most iconic actresses separated by Hollywood’s first Chinese American movie star has a visual power that is further heightened by the diametrically opposite trajectories their personal and professional careers would subsequently take: Despite at one point living so close to one another that Riefenstahl claims to have been able to see into Detrich’s window, only to become icons for opposing sides during World War II. At the same time, Wong completely upstaged Detrich in Shanghai Express but was consistently excluded from leading roles because of her ethnicity.

As different as these three women were, they faced a common challenge: the need to establish and maintain their identity in an industry where the attention of audiences and investors is fleeting and fickle. Koe uses the Berlin picture as the starting point from which to explore the costs and consequences of celebrity and, in a series of gloriously-named vignettes – The Failed Socio-Situationist Sculptor in Düsseldorf; The Malayan Orangutan has the Key to the Basement of the Leipzig Zoo – reveal the flawed and vulnerable reality of life behind the façade of stardom. Through the lens of her imagination, we are given first-person perspectives of a morphine-addicted Riefenstahl dragging out the filming of Tiefland as long as possible in the hopes that the war will end before production does, hear Wong’s frustration at being simultaneously ‘too Chinese’ for an American Audience and not Chinese enough for an Asian one, and enter the dark Parisian bedroom where an octogenarian Detrich lives in penniless and squalid glamour, shielding herself from prying eyes and re-living past glory.

Koe is, among many other things, editor of the National Museum of Singapore’s film journal. Although the intimate insights she offers into these iconic women’s inner lives are by necessity fictional, she imbues them with an impressive authenticity, the most striking of which is an impassioned interview in which Riefenstahl defends her integrity as an artist, calls out Susan Sontag as a jealous hypocrite and rejects the label of ‘feminist’. She also uses these vivid and sympathetic ‘factional’ portraits to draw attention to other characters whose experiences are just as real but much less visible to the general public. These range from the soldier on the set of Tiefland struggling to deal with the death of the man he loves to Deitrich’s Chinese maid, a victim of sex-trafficking whose small kindnesses and ignorance of her employer’s identity free Detrich from ‘the pressure of not being Marlene enough.’

Koe is already being spoken of in company with Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan. If Delayed Rays of a Star is anything to go by, such comparisons are thoroughly justified.