SINGAPORE – United Kingdom-based Singapore author Kasan Goh is a little bashful when asked how long he took to write his debut novel, Billy, Seetoh & Co, a drifting, Cubist portrait of student squatters in London based partially on his life.

“I’m told not to say this,” the 63-year-old says, but proceeds anyway to place its beginnings some 30 years ago in 1996.

Then, he had just returned to Singapore in search of work a decade after his father, prominent author Goh Poh Seng, and mother, editor Margaret Joyce, emigrated to Canada under scandalous circumstances.

It was a time of moral outrage and Western paranoia. The Government had shut down his father’s live music venue, Rainbow Lounge, after persistent conflict caused by his organising Singapore’s first mass rock concert starring English artiste David Bowie and – the final nail in the coffin – an “indecent” Hokkien remark made by local band Speedway onstage.

“It was scandalous, but when I returned, nobody asked what happened. I thought, ‘But those last 10 years were tumultuous.’ At the same time, I didn’t know how to talk about it. It was all churning inside me,” he says.

He was then in his 30s, nursing fresh memories of squatting in abandoned properties between Brixton and North Peckham to make ends meet as a student at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture.

His well-to-do family – his father was also a doctor – had lost everything in the fallout. The eldest of four brothers became a castaway.

Billy, Seetoh & Co is his best attempt at “catching lightning in the bottle”, he says, to communicate that texture of chaos and possibility.

That sense of flux was one reason he insisted on keeping the unwieldy and bureaucratic-sounding title despite the concerns of his publisher, Goh Eck Kheng of Landmark books, about its marketability. Co is shorthand for the amorphous ensemble that comes and goes throughout the book with little introduction.