The Enigmatic Madam Ingram 

By Meihan Boey
Fiction/Epigram/Paperback/456 pages/$26.90 from Epigram Books (str.sg/iYHU)
4 stars

Meihan Boey is indisputably the product of a happily rojak Singapore upbringing. The country’s post-colonial education system, with its European-heavy literature syllabus, and its multicultural society with a panoply of gods and monsters, is the perfect Petri dish for her creative imagination. 

The resulting mishmash of myths was put to entertaining effect in The Formidable Miss Cassidy (2021), which shared that year’s Epigram Fiction Prize with Sebastian Sim’s And The Award Goes To Sally Bong!

Fans of the earlier book will doubtless enjoy this sequel, which moves the timeline of the main narrative to turn-of-20th-century Singapore. 

The mysterious Mrs Letty Kingsbright nee Ingram arrives in Singapore in the middle of a dark and stormy day. Yes, the literature nerd-spotting begins from the first paragraph now that Boey has laid the groundwork for readers schooled in the Victorian tropes of this series. 

Mrs Kingsbright’s ostensible purpose is to visit her shiftless husband James Henry, an opium-addled wastrel. In reality, she is looking to meet the renowned medium Madam Kay, also known as Yeling.

Madam Kay is the twin sister of Kay Yezi, also known as Mrs De Souza. They are the daughters of businessman Kay Wing Tong, all characters whom readers will recognise with much affection from the first book. 

Letty is suffering from debilitating, mysterious blackouts and she hopes Madam Kay can cure her. The fact that she is seeking aid from a medium signals that her condition is supernatural, not physical.

The narrative is a multi-limbed beast, reaching backwards and forward in time.

One arc follows Letty’s origin story. Her mysteriously glamorous mother Rose Ingram, hailing from colonial Malaya, is the exotic wife of wealthy trader William Ingram who enthrals London society.  

Another storyline tracks Mr Kay’s astral plane “visits” with the inimitable Miss Cassidy, who has relocated back to Scotland. This budding romance is the source of comedy as well as a plot driver.

Yet another plot line spins out Miss Cassidy’s India sojourn as a governess with the Randall family, before the events of the first book.

And then there is the apparition of a dancing ghost, who seems to be linked to everyone from Mr Kay to Letty to Miss Cassidy. 

If this seems like a lot to juggle, it is. It is sometimes an effort to keep characters and timelines straight, especially when characters change their names for various reasons. This is not a read for those suffering from attention deficit. 

But readers who enjoy a lengthy immersion in another world will be richly rewarded with this textured tale that pulls together multiple strands of political, social and history elements. 

As much as the supernatural horror here reaches for the creep factor, the focus on the otherworldly female pivots on a very modern reclaiming of female power. What ties all the twisty plot lines together is the bond between women – whether it is mother-daughter, sisters or friends. 

Whether human or supernatural, the women here wield and abuse power in myriad ways that reflect the complexity of this bond. This nuanced depiction of women is one of the chief pleasures of the book. 

While The Formidable Miss Cassidy had some of the same elements of multicultural mixing and subversion of literary tropes, The Enigmatic Madam Ingram marks a noticeable escalation in ambition and scope. There is a lithe confidence to the way Boey leaps between genres and yokes together disparate mythologies for her own storytelling purposes. 

She also plumbs new depths in her exploration of multicultural and postcolonial identities. But this does not deter her from having fun while accomplishing all these things. And fun is what readers are guaranteed, whether you just want a pacy read or enjoy the brainier pleasure of picking apart the complex tapestry of influences. 

If you like this, read: The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo (William Morrow, 2014, $14.36 from Amazon.sg, go to amzn.to/48k7bda). Ignore the stilted Netflix series and go to the spine-tingling source instead. The Ghost Bride tells of a girl from a poor family who agrees to become the ghost bride for the late scion of a wealthy family.