[ book excerpt: short stories ]

Philip Holden: “The Strange Machine of Dr Goh”

“I was interested in complicated stories,” academic-turned-counsellor (and fiction writer) Philip Holden told novelist Willam Cooper in a recent interview.

The authors’ discussion wound around a genre they favour—fictive alternative history—and probed the ethics of writing it.

Currently a Singapore permanent resident, Holden, a UBC graduate (PhD), made a distinction in that interview between his understanding of historical figures (Singaporean ones, in particular) and the usual narratives told about them, in which they are either wholly heroic or villainous.

The complications and contradictions of real-life individuals, Holden suggested, are what make them especially suitable for story-writing.

The earlier edition of Heaven Has Eyes—”set in Singapore, Vancouver, London, and the spaces in between”—appeared in 2016. Cha magazine Michael Tsang reviewer lauded the author for a short fiction volume that showcased Holden’s “mastery of literary techniques and his power of observation to reveal nuanced aspects of Singapore that lie beneath its neoliberal glamour.”

For the 2026 edition, published in January, Holden adds several new stories. 

The British Columbia Review would like to thank Philip Holden and publisher Gaudy Boy for permission to reprint the following story excerpt.

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“The Strange Machine of Dr Goh” [excerpt]

I spent a long evening filling out a grant application, which was approved post-haste. Two weeks later, in the middle of May, I found myself in the West End in Vancouver after a long trans-Pacific flight. The air was clear, like natural air conditioning. After I checked into my hotel, I walked in Stanley Park to try to stay awake until sunset, at least, on this long, early summer day. I passed the bowling greens, then flower beds and the rhododendron garden, bushes already in bloom, and worked my way into the wilder section of the park. By the side of the path water flowed, and skunk cabbage and horsetails had sprung up. In the lower canopy the vine maples were still green, thin branches reaching everywhere, their leaves a constellation of tiny green stars. Above me, the skeletons of huge cedar trees, the bark and the trunks twisted, with broken crowns and candelabra branches that reached up beyond the limits of sight. It felt like I might be in the wilderness, miles from anywhere, then I’d hear the throbbing of a float-plane’s engine and see the aircraft pass overhead like a shadow as it came in to land.

At night, I slept soundly for the first time in months. When I woke in the queen-size bed with its soft cotton sheets, I did not know where I was. Through the window, I saw the sunlight turning the tips of the tower blocks in the street outside yellow. I got up, brushed my teeth, and began to prepare for my meeting with Penny Chew.

She had said that I should only come at two o’clock. After breakfast, I walked up Barclay to her apartment complex to check out the lay of the land. Something had shifted since I arrived. The sun was orange now, and the patches of snow on the mountains had a purple tint. I coughed: a hint of smoke in the air, of wood burning. I’d read about the forest fires in the interior of the province. When I first came here a decade ago I’d escaped from a Singapore choked by smoke from peat fires in Sumatra and landed in Vancouver to air that was clear as crystal. Now the fires had followed me, spreading across the globe.

The apartment building where Penny lived was a relic from the 1930s, three storeys of red brick topped by a mock Tudor facade, its black beams and white plaster reminding me of the black and white walk-up flats on Portsdown Road at home. Above the porch, carved into stone, was its name: Maple Court.

By afternoon it was raining, and the temperature had dropped. Junuary—I remembered that word from my Vancouver days to describe a summer that never quite arrives. I pressed the buzzer for her apartment, and a voice chirped back at me, its familiar clipped accent not quite erased by long Canadian vowels and rolling Rs. The lift seemed out of order, or at least very slow to respond, so I took the stairs. The carpet was thick, olive, with a design of golden tendrils that reached upwards and out of the frame. On the edges of the treads and on the landings, it had worn threadbare, so that a grid of fibres showed through. I slipped once and steadied myself against the wooden banisters, covered with a century of scratches and layers of varnish. On the third floor, I looked down the corridor and saw a small figure at an open door, waving to me. Penny.

Her apartment was bigger than I expected. She led me past a galley kitchen and through a short passageway that widened to a long living room with a wall of leaded windows, through which a green light was filtered by a sea of trees in leaf. Near the window, a low table at which we sat down. At the back of the room, her loom, like a monstrous sea creature with an open mouth, rows of vertical white threads like baleen and, where the threads met, a strip of brilliant cloth, deep red hatched with white, like a truncated tongue. Laid down at the side was the shuttle, its wood smooth with the passing of hands—like the bui in the temples you used to take me to in childhood, Father, those worn, wooden half-moons you’d throw and throw again, seeking answers to our questions and the shape of our lives ahead.

She served tea. I’d brought a small bag of gifts: Prima Deli laksa paste, kaya, a packet of salted egg fish skin: the things you get for Singaporeans overseas. She simply thanked me and put the bag aside. Later, when I tried to recall her face, I could not remember it. I could have passed her in the street and not recognized her again. But I remember her hands, the fingers long and spindly, swelling into pads at the tip, like a lizard’s feet. Her feet were bare, their knuckle joints swollen, and they made me think again of you.

I found you once sitting in the chair next to the kitchen door, head bowed. I was brave enough to ask if you felt tired or unhappy, and you said, brightly, no, you were looking for a grain of uncooked rice that had fallen on the floor. We searched for it, me squatting next to your chair, but it was invisible among the flecks on the cream tiles. I noticed your toes, their joints as swollen as Penny’s were, the nails overly long and hooked over, like the claws of a huge bird of prey. Somehow this brought to mind a couplet you’d written out for me on my graduation, all those years ago when I’d said I wanted to continue my studies, something about a sea of knowledge and a鲲鹏, a roc, a great bird that could fly ten thousand miles. But all I said to you was, You should cut those nails soon.

I asked Penny about the box, and she said she had it ready in her study, the room through the doorway over there. Could I take photographs? Of course. Surely I must be impatient to start, to find out the truth about Dr Goh and his machine?

She showed me to the place she’d made for me at her desk in the study. The box was on a side table: an old, black cardboard shoebox, oversize, bulging, and held together by twine—too small for something on which my career would depend. After she left me, I could hear her scuffling in the other room, then the sound of the loom, the hiss of the reed bringing the rows of warp threads together, the clicks of the treadles, and the shuttle passing back and forth.

Before I left in the early evening, she asked if I’d found what I was looking for. I told her I wasn’t sure. Given the quantity of material, I’d taken photographs mostly, not notes. At times I’d slowed down, focused, and read passages in detail. I thought I was beginning to understand, but I needed to look more closely. I’d thank her, of course, in the acknowledgements for my research. I felt awkward saying goodbye, as if I’d taken something and given nothing in return. As I passed through the living room I noticed that the loom was bare, and there was a coil of red thread next to the shuttle.



[Editor’s note: As a stop on the Heaven Has Eyes Book Tour, Philip Holden returns to UBC to launch his story collection on February 10, 5-6:30pm. Green College Coach House. The event will be live-streamed.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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