Singaporean debut author Malcom Seah is a writer of originality, scope and ambition, who is unafraid to take on challenging issues, ranging from eating disorders, to sexual abuse, to the complexities of coming out in a conservative society. He is skilled at plotting, marrying his intricate and intriguing plot with elements of experimental fiction.

Swimming Lessons is an often-moving gay coming-of-age story, combined with a whodunnit, layered with supernatural elements. The action extends from 2011 to 2022, and takes place entirely in Singapore, with Singaporean characters of differing ethnic backgrounds: Chinese, Indian, Malay. Seah does an excellent job of evoking the city, not only its people, but also its weather, social stratification, food, and fragments of jungle. The culturally specific references are enjoyable, from “the gassy slurp of a can of Tiger Beer” to the void decks of local Singaporean housing developments, “the ones that the elderly use to play chess every morning.”

The swimming lessons of the title refer literally to swimming lessons the main character, Michelle, received as a child from her older sister, Meredith, but throughout Seah also uses swimming, and being in water, in figurative ways. A few years after Michelle’s childhood swimming lessons, Meredith suffers a subarachnoid brain hemorrhage. Seah compares the state of being comatose to being underwater: “blurred by the murky pool, hindered by its resistance, accompanied by the perpetual chill of darkness.” Later still, Michelle is floating in the shallow waters off one of Singapore’s beaches when Seah draws attention to water’s well-known ability to rinse. Michelle realises she has shed many fears: “I’ve never felt so free. So unapologetically candid with myself about who I am and what I am.”

For much of the novel, Meredith is lying comatose in hospital. That Meredith’s life is in danger spurs Michelle to think about their shared past, and her memories of her older sister prompt others: of their parents’ divorce; of her difficult relationship with her mother; of her experience of an eating disorder; of a rape; of first love and her questioning of her own sexuality.

In a nod towards experimental fiction, Seah conveys the story of Michelle’s childhood and early adulthood non-chronologically, through fragmentary memories. These are intercut with two more straightforward narratives: that of Michael, who is Michelle’s contemporary, and that of Ishaan, who is a man in middle age.

Michael’s chapters are written in the first person, underlining the narrowness and the limitation of his understanding of both the events of the novel, and of his own self. Ishaan, whose chapters are written in the third person, is Michael’s boss. Both are policemen assigned to the Department for Supernatural Oddities.

During his first night on duty, Michael receives a strange phone call from a woman apparently lost in a forest. Who is she? Why is she calling Michael?  Is she a living woman, or a ghost? These questions drive a significant plot strand, and I won’t give away its resolution. Suffice to say that Seah uses the apparently supernatural to explore Michael’s experience of fear, guilt, remorse, and the unknown.

Ishaan’s older sister’s links to life are as problematic as Meredith’s. Isa is no longer living: she appears in the novel—but as what? A presence shaped by Ishaan’s memories, and now conjured by his imagination? Or as a literal ghost?  When we think of the dead, we often feel we are communing with them. But are we? Seah develops a theory about how we each experience the reaction between matter and antimatter in our own unique way, thus (somehow) preserving (I think) the idea that ghosts are really out there, beyond our own psyches, but explaining them in natural, not supernatural terms.

The supernatural (or not) has thus been introduced into a coming-of-age story concerned with indisputably natural trauma: a bold linkage that perhaps risks  trivializing the wounds of Michelle’s more than usually complex adolescence.

Readers may also ask if Seah could have allowed himself to slow down, and to explore some of his chosen complexities in greater detail. A teenage girl’s experience of an eating disorder, as a case in point, could fill a whole novel, and often has. But Michelle’s experience of an eating disorder—surely anorexia, although the condition is not named—barely seems to mark her.

Conveying a story through fragmentary memories can risk confusion. Michelle remarks:

Years are blending together in a full beam of simultaneity. The past, present and future are all converging. There is no linearity to memory. Scenes interrupt and cascade over each other like a poorly-cut film.

This is all very well, but it is not always clear when one event happens, or happened, relative to another.

Such reservations aside, Swimming Lessons is an enthusiastic and energetic novel from an author clearly brimming with potential.

Rosie Milne runs Asian Books Blog twitter@asianbooksblog. She lives in Singapore.