By Samantha Toh

This review of Amanda Lee Koe's Delayed Rays of a Star was one week late; it felt impossible to write. With each passing page, my anxiety ballooned with Lee Koe's ambition. The novel spans the width of a century (with its full suite of glamour and horrors), the depth of six to seven characters' desires (crave fame, crave love, crave art's pure supremacy!), and some of our epoch's biggest, most important questions. So an exhortation: a review of a thousand words can barely begin to unwrap this debut novel.

But if it's just judgment you're after, you're in luck. I found Delayed Rays very good indeed. The book springs from the moment a photograph is taken of three real actresses, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl, at the 1928 Berlin Press Ball. It was an unlikely intersection of paths that then diverged in ways none could have foreseen. Delayed Rays takes us down each character's road, but brings flat biography to life, augmenting fact with an imagined, behind-the-curtain view. Lee Koe fleshes out scenes one could never find in history books: Wong as a Dietrich sexual conquest and fond, brief acquaintance of German thinker Walter Benjamin; the daily dramas of an incontinent Dietrich in her 80's; Riefenstahl on the set of Tiefland, and then a few weeks before her death, as a 101-year-old interviewee justifying her life and work. Lee Koe also pastiches her classic short story format into the novel, by interweaving into the three stars' lives brief stories of fictional characters: Bébé, a Chinese refugee who works as Dietrich's maid in 1989 Paris; "Bogie", a mysterious poem-reading man whose telephone calls that same year leave Dietrich on the hook; and Hans Haas, a best boy on Riefenstahl's Tiefland set, who must come to terms with his repeated acts of cowardice. Lee Koe's worlds are well-researched. Her stories stand on pillars of history and biography, such that writer's fantasy and reality begin to bleed into each other. It is cinema.

Lee Koe's characters are what turn the film reel. Each cast member behaves as would humans you or I know, that is, imperfectly. She has us liking characters even as we don't. Dietrich is as lewdly charming as she is bratty. Wong is as sensible and tragic as she is self-pitying. And in the book, there was none as masterfully rendered as the character Leni Riefenstahl, the hardest to craft precisely because Riefenstahl (the woman) is so easy to loathe. Controversial for having made documentaries (propaganda) glorifying the Nazi Party, Riefenstahl was ultimately cleared of being a Nazi. But the question of how we should define complicity in a period where millions, including the Jewish, Soviets, Romanis and LGBTQ, were systematically murdered is one that hangs over that period – and on the shoulders of one Leni Riefenstahl.

Lee Koe does a good job, however, of forcing us to suspend immediate disgust, in part by situating Riefenstahl in identifiable, thematic struggles common to the rest of her characters. Delayed Rays' Riefenstahl struggles as an ambitious woman in a man's world. She wants to be recognised as a brilliant artist in her own right. This motif, also present in Dietrich's and Wong's stories, reminds us that Riefenstahl can be relatable. Her opportunistic streak might have led her to throw her lot in with a vile crew. But this ambition was present long before the rise of the Nazis.  In our first glimpse of Riefenstahl, she had, "all evening," tried to get her photograph taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, a man "up and coming...in good standing". We later find out that she has constantly used men to advance her career; first the Chilean expat who teaches her tennis, then the Romanian Jewish producer who promotes her dancing, then director Arnold Fanck, who casts her in her first movie. To drop these names in a sequence right before narrating Riefenstahl's first encounter with Hitler – her most infamous sponsor – is, subtly, to take some of the exceptionalism out of Riefenstahl's collaboration with the man. It also reminds us that men controlled the entire system, and to a large extent, any woman's destiny. Even if we must despise Riefenstahl, is that all we are allowed to feel?

Lee Koe's devices, from irony to inter-story parallels, create a pathos that suggests the answer: no. In the first long section devoted to Riefenstahl, the character chants, "Ars longa, vita brevis!" – life is short, but art is long. This was not in fact the case for Riefenstahl the woman, whose life was long at 101 years, but whose directing career came to a halt after the war. We, the omniscient readers, know how history will turn out for Riefenstahl. We know her efforts will be in vain. Yet Lee Koe takes us through the character's hopes – she prays for Germany to win the war, "not because she was a patriot, not because she was loyal to the Party, not because H[itler] could do no wrong, but because...she did not want to go down with any of them". We see her dragging out the production of Tiefland, and in her acknowledgement that off set, Europe "down below...was all hair and teeth and eyes", one is forced to question how much of her political complicity was more about self-preservation. To what degree can we dismiss Riefenstahl's claim that she was "not responsible for anything else other than making the best films she could", when some pages before, Anna May Wong herself questions whether it is "really necessary to marry one's politics with one's art"? And as Lee Koe reveals Dietrich to be as ambitious and willing to exploit others for her own means, she seeds doubt in Dietrich's own morality -- how much of Dietrich's tours with the American GIs was an attempt to cement her own fame?

The characters' engagement with weighty questions aside, I enjoyed the plotting. It seemed that Lee Koe knew exactly where the novel was going, and placed each detail in its fitting spot. She links characters across time and space, lining up chance encounters and commonalities that mimic the coincidences found in life itself -- Bébé is from Taishan, where Wong's grandfather immigrated from in 1853; "Bogie" is a half-Turkish German and target of the racism that continues to exist in his country; Walter Benjamin, earmarked by racial persecution, writes his own racial fetish essay, "A Chinoiserie from the Old West"; Hans Haas' identity -- if revealed -- would have rendered him one of Hitler's victims, but he ends up on Riefenstahl's set, preventing gypsy extras, taken from a concentration camp, from escaping. Throughout the century in which the novel is set, othering continues, as does persecution, as does the power of the oppressed as oppressors themselves, in some shape or form. Lee wants to make a point. She does.

One could criticise Lee Koe's style as overly-architectured, even overly loud. She bashes you over the head with writing drenched in everything from foreshadowing to symbolism and juxtaposition. Wong's chapters, for instance, are marked with Chinese characters even though she doesn't speak any Chinese language, reminding us throughout the book that Wong cannot escape her stereotypes, even as she plays into them. Another example comes to mind. At the tail end of one chapter, Wong reflects on how her correspondence with Walter Benjamin trickled off during World War II; "he must have moved to a different lodging," she hypothesises, envying his mobility as a freelancer.  A few pages later, we find out that the Jewish Benjamin, far from enjoying a freelancer's freedom, has been skipping from residence to residence to avoid capture. Finally, about to be handed over to the Gestapo, he kills himself. Cue next: a section on Riefenstahl filming Tiefland, greenlit by the Third Reich's own Propaganda Ministry headed by the anti-Semitic Joseph Goebbels. So it's true that there isn't much subtlety in how the chapters connect, and in the conclusions Lee Koe wants us to draw. Nor is there such delicacy in her sentences: Lee Koe has an 88-year-old Dietrich reading with a magnifying glass, pissing into a "two quart casserole dish and porcelain pitcher with hand-painted roses", shitting a shape "like a petit croissant". Lee Koe's flamboyance sometimes veers her characters dangerously into caricature, while some scenes become so deliberate as to show the author's hand. But flamboyance can be both a weakness and a strength, and in many cases – for their memorability and daring – I find the risk taken worthwhile.

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