The Riot Act

I read and reviewed Sim's other book Let's Give it Up for Gimme Lao! earlier this year. I quite enjoyed that book; it was a fun read, with sharp satire and humour. I was therefore looking forward to this book, but I feel rather let down. I don't think it lived up to the promise of its predecessor, and despite the fact that it won the Epigram Prize in 2018, I didn't think it was particularly good. 

The Riot Act presents a fictionalised account of the 2013 Little India riot in Singapore, where migrant workers, primarily from India, attacked a bus after it fatally struck a migrant labourer. The event and its aftermath not only displayed the powerful control and censorship exercised by the Singapore government, but also the terrible plight of migrant workers, who build the city's infrastructure but are treated with disparate, exploitative, and often cruel regulations and behavior. T

The events that followed (a targeted alcohol ban, heavy fees to be paid by political bloggers, a public protest, scandals concerning the rich and powerful) are all well known in Singaporean politics, but Sim deals with these issues with a tone that isn't sharp, satirical,or even particularly funny. The tone instead is of a sniggering schoolboy who has yet to outgrow his fear of girls. The book is narrated from the perspective of three women, and while I don't think that men should not write from the perspective of women (or vice versa), this book is a great example of how some men are unable to write about women at all. Each woman in a book that focuses on women is depicted as malicious, manipulative, cowardly, and stupid; the only characters positively depicted are gay men or dead migrant labourers. It certainly says a great deal about the author; I don't think it says very much about the events he is claiming to portray. This is a mean-spirited, unpleasant little book and I did not care for it.