River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh

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Desperate for another fix of Opium War-based derring-do after finishing Tai-Pan, I picked up River of Smoke after spying it during one of my late-night waiting-for-the-train-at-Victoria-station-might-as-well-have-a-look-at-the-tat-in-WHSmith’s endeavours. Despite sporting a cover that would be better suited to a rejected Cecelia Ahern novel, the book managed to sucker me in with a blurb that promised an exotic location, 19^th-century imperialism, and a take on a familiar situation (the first Opium War) from a different perspective.

River of Smoke follows a bunch of characters living in Canton in the years just prior to the first time the British decided to showcase their love of ‘free trade’ in China: i.e., the freedom to have life-destroying drugs imported to your country while the gunboats look on. They all live in Fanqui-town, which is a little enclave outside the main city of Canton; foreign devils, of course, are not allowed to live anywhere else in the country - which, given how they behave, isn’t an altogether unreasonable situation; as one Chinese character puts it late in the novel, they don’t want China to end up as ‘another Hindustan.’ The wily Chinese, then, have judged the British character well, and no error!

So there’s a merry community of English, Americans, Dutch, Portuguese and Indian merchants living just outside the margins of Chinese society, pretty much living by their own rules and flaunting Chinese law when it suits them. The corrupt Chinese officials themselves get rich skimming a few taels off the opium trade, and therefore are rather lax about enforcing its supposed prohibition. This uneasy situation has been going for some time when the book opens, with the foreigners unused to much in the way of attention from the Chinese law enforcers.

All this changes when the seemingly-honest and incorruptible Commisioner Lin arrives. He travels like a commoner, refuses to take bribes, and is determined to enforce the Emperor’s edicts outlawing the trade in opium. Suddenly, things get very unpleasant around Fanqui-town as the foreign Tai-Pans - business magnates grown rich on plying their killer trade – try to outdo one another in protestations that they are in fact good men trying to introduce to the barbarian Chinese the selfless notions of free trade and globalisation.

So what did I think of the book? Well, it should be noted that the above plot description probably accounts for about 40% of the actual narrative. By the time the plot actually kicked in, Ghosh had quite worn me down for what felt like a thousand pages with every possible side-track plot he could think of. The Fanqui-town residents are many, and not one side-street of their winding lives goes unexamined. Every walk-on character is treated to an extensive discourse on their family history, often going back two or three generations. Some might find that this technique adds depth to the setting, but I found that nine times out of ten it just overloads the reader with information that becomes useless immediately after if has been imparted. As much as I appreciate a well fleshed-out fictional world, the book became so much more enjoyable when the plot actually got started and I realised quite how much Ghosh had been jerking me around with these pointless plotless sidetracks. He’s like the Terry Gillingham of novelists: he really is good at what he does, but man does he need a strict editor.

There’s also the issue of food: at the drop of a hat, Ghosh is likely to abandon whatever thin wisp of plot that might be floating around and just have the characters pig out. He will then spend half a page or more describing, in loving detail, every exotic morsel of what is usually the kind of feast that Tiberius would have been proud of. Not one paratha, masala, chakki or daal-purri goes undescribed.

And that touches on another issue. Ghosh is Indian, but he’s lived all over the world, and is writing for the English market. Yet the amount of non-English words he drops into the book, without a sniff of a glossary, is literally astonishing. Writers of historical fiction are always quick to drop in a few foreign words, usually hygienically sealed in italic, as a way of adding local colour. But even as a veteran of Anglo-English literature, and no stranger to the odd maidanor jemhadar, I quickly became distanced from the story by entire pages in which I did not recognise one single noun. The use of language is a quite deliberate tactic used by Ghosh to portray the mix of cultures that inhabit Canton, as I describe below, but its over-use grates massively.

As a pedant, something that bothered me that probably wouldn’t bother most people was Ghosh’s somewhat creative use of punctuation, in particular when it comes to dialogue. In short, he frequently leaves his dialogue without quotation marks, as if he was some sort of Indian James Joyce or something. At first I tried to spot the logic behind this; perhaps he uses this technique to indicate that characters were not actually speaking English; it also occurred to me that he might only be using it for Indian characters, or just for the main character Bahram. But none of these rules are adhered to consistently as far as I could see, so this confusing lack of punctuation remains a mystery to me.

Something I did like about River of Smoke was its focus on the non-Europeans amongst the opium merchants. Bahram is an Indian Zoroastian who is just as rich a businessman as his white colleagues, and yet he finds that when it comes to the crunch, he is not considered one of them. It’s interesting to discover that Indian merchants were extensively mixed-up in the opium trade; we are so used to thinking about it as a European-dominated industry.

Ghosh has said in interviews that his ultimate goal with his books is to show that much of the world was a dynamic, globalised network of trading and learning even without the input of Europeans. The theme of globalisation is hit again and again in the book; the language, food and commodities of the characters come from a multitude of backgrounds (each of which is usually exhaustively followed up). The author is showing that even before the intervention of Europeans, the East had a sophisticated mix of cultures and trade.

And yet it must be said that the book languishes in what colonial Europeans would call ‘Oriental decadence,’ revelling in its choking, smothering richness of food and languages, and going absolutely nowhere, until the Fanqui-town Europeans take centre-stage towards the final third to deal with the threat to their livelihood and inject some actual plot to the proceedings. If by the time I came to the closing chapters I felt a few pangs of regret, it was the regret of a hostage who’s acquired Stockholm Syndrome: a massive book like this will sometimes charm the reader just because of the sheer amount of time they’ve spent in its world.

River of Smoke isn’t an adventure story, and it isn’t a fast-paced breezy read. Despite its odd and obvious flaws, its far closer to actual literature than anything else I’ve read lately. The prose style is absolutely gorgeous, and this coupled with the interesting setting, is probably what kept me reading. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s the kind of book I will return to in several years’ time and enjoy much more. I certainly can see how many people would probably enjoy the book: there really is a lot to like, despite all my bellyaching. Somehow, I’m not sorry that my urge to chase the Opium War dragon led me to River of Smoke.

Tai-Pan by James Clavell

Forget your invasions, your battles and sieges: the most exciting theme to come out of the entire back-catalogue of Empire fiction is TRADE! Tea, silks, spices and of course opium were what kept the Empire ticking over, providing shedloads of cash to fuel the growing worldwide British conquests of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Military takeovers, after all, are expensive, messy affairs that are of little use on their own, and of course the British engaged in these only when they absolutely had to (though they proved extraordinarily good at it, over and over again…). But when TRADE was involved, well roll up your red-sleeves, private, because you’re going to be sent in to sort out those fuzzy-wuzzies and teach them how to make some economic use of their land… at the point of a bayonet, of course.

If ever a book will make you believe (even for the span of a mere 700 pages) that stock markets and tea prices can be as exciting as battles and wars, it’s Tai-Pan.

I’ve always been suspicious of these chunky, doorstop historical novels that promise ‘epic, sweeping’ tales that follow the fortunes a cast of characters more numerous than the medals on a tinpot dictator’s chest. Partly it’s because they usually fall into the ‘airport novel’ category for me, what with their authors’ names embossed in gold text larger than the title. I know this is largely down to literary snobbery on my part; the thought that the idea of a book should always take precedent over, y’know, telling an entertaining story. And if a book is marketed towards people who care more about who the author is than what the book is about (cough cough James Patterson), than the idea can’t be up to much.

I’ve always been haunted by this anecdote from my brother’s bookshop-working days:

Customer: I’m looking for something by James Patterson. I love him.

Brother: No problem. His books are over here. Which ones have you read already?

Customer: (looking at books) Eh… I’m not sure. I can’t remember.

Partly too, my suspicion down to the books’ enormous length. I usually admire conciseness in writing and storytelling, and the whole Victorian-author-being-paid-by-the-word style has never struck me as a good way to produce literary quality. Of course, their insane length is what allows these books to be epic and sweeping, as they claim to be. Still, why they have to be heavier than a bad date at an arthouse cinema is still somewhat mystifying to me.

James Clavell does not come to me without some baggage, either. As a kid, I was enthralled and saddened by his weirdo cod-Japanese fantasy Thrump-O-Moto, an insane picture-book fable about an Australian girl on crutches who hangs out with a tiny Japanese wizard-in-training. If I recall, it has a leprechaun in it, and a villain with the hilarious name of Nurk-U The Bad.

While in university, I tried really hard to read Shogun, which is probably the novel that most people know him for (it was made into a successful TV miniseries in 1980). The book promised an ‘epic, sweeping’ tale of Japan in the 1600s, but despite being based heavily on the fascinating real-life story of William Adams, the ‘English Samurai’, I found it an interminable snoozefest. I can proudly say that it remains unfinished by me to this day.

So is it any wonder that Tai-Pan sat on my shelf for close to six months (albeit inclusive of two moves of house)?

Well I’m sure glad I gave Clavell another shot, because Tai-Pan is one of the most enjoyable doorstops I’ve ever spend a month of my life with.

The setting is China in early 1841. The British have just wound up the first Opium War, ensuring themselves many more years of merrily providing the Chinese with the killer, life-destroying drug. As part of the reparations (how darethe Orientals try to outlaw the importation of such a product!), Britain has acquired the barren, uninhabited island of Hong Kong. While some see little merit in this, its deep natural harbours and closeness to the mainland are seen as a blessing by others, in particular the giant Scottish trader Dirk Struan, Tai-Pan (or boss) of the Noble House trading company.

Struan is a mountain of a man, in body, personality and influence. The many plots in the book revolve around him, and the book twists history into making it seem as if Struan deliberately manipulated the Chinese and British into going to war, as part of a deliberate scheme to acquire Hong Kong. The cast of characters mostly stems from Struan: his mistresses, sons (legitimate and illegitimate), his business partners, rivals and enemies. This is Empire-building as seen from the point of view of the businessman rather than the soldier, though Struan has long-term plans for the company that might one-day affect the entire practise of colonialism.

The most fascinating aspect of Tai-Pan is its world-building. I’m hard-pressed to think of another work which so well conjures-up the detail and minutia of a forgotten time. Absolutely nothing about the lives of the Europeans in 1840s China seems familiar; not the way they talk, think or act. It’s almost impossible to imagine how Clavell would have acquired enough information to build this fictional society from research- unless of course, he’s making it all up. The nuances of contemporary trade and politics are entered into in more detail than in most similar works. The characters rarely feel like thinly-disguised 20^th-century people in period grab, partly because the book was written in 1966, before the uber-PC standards that we’re now used to came about. As a result, Tai-Panfeels like a genuinely different world, full of characters whose morals and mindsets are utterly alien to us.

Even the length of the book didn’t bother me too much; it rarely becomes dull. It’s true that the much-maligned ‘who-will-be-best-dressed-at-the-ball’ subplot drags on for what seems like hundreds of pages, but it rarely dominates the other, better material. There’s so much good stuff going on- pirates, suspicious Russians, Chinese secret societies- that there’s always something to keep you reading. I would have appreciated some more strong Chinese characters, mind.

Clavell has a whole pile of other books that follow the fortunes of the Noble House over the next 150 years. It probably won’t be anytime soon, but I might one day be persuaded to take on another such behemoth again.

Flashman And The Dragon by George MacDonald Frasier

Man, it’s good to come back to Flashman. After a period of trying to broaden my palate with other popular historical fiction writers of varying quality, it took less than one paragraph of Flashman And The Dragon to remind me of what I was missing. I was beginning to think that I was holding other writers to some unfair or impossible ideal; but no, I have been reminded that Flashman really is that good. This is what historical fiction is capable of, and there’s no excuse for anything less.

Chronologically, we meet Flashy here just after his pre-civil-war adventures with Tom Brown in the USA (that adventure is chronicled in Flashman and the Angel of the Lord). Somehow he has wound up in Hong Kong, awaiting a ship home. Of course, once again his attention for the ladies gets him into trouble, and our ‘hero’ winds up running opium into the Chinese mainland, hoping to make some quick cash and get some attention from a smitten clergyman’s wife. But it’s all a ruse, and Flashy ends up getting a much closer look than he intended at the fighting that has been tearing China apart for ten years…

By 1860, when Flashman foolishly drifts up the Yangtse, the rebels known as the Taipings were at their greatest strength. Years earlier, the movement had started when a humble clerk failed his exams and fell into a religious frenzy. He came up with his own crazed version of the Christianity that was being peddled by Westerners in China at the time, and gathered quite a following, which eventually snowballed into what was effectively the biggest and bloodiest civil war of all time, with an estimated death toll up to sixty million. The Taipings fought against the Imperial forces of the Manchu dynasty, the invaders from the north who had ruled China as a high caste for centuries, engulfing enormous swathes of China in their war. Somehow, this event has slipped off the radar in the intervening years, and Westerners, for the most part, have never even heard of this titanic conflict. Perhaps it’s because the Taiping Rebellion, as it’s known, had the misfortune to have occurred around the same time as the far more fashionable American Civil War (though it lasted eleven years longer than Lee and Grant’s little spat).

Please excuse the excessive use of italics, but the real-life figures and history that Fraser has to play with here are absolutely astonishing, especially given their little-known status in this part of the world.

But there’s more: in the midst of this mind-blowing struggle, Britain decided to step into to once again force the issue of trade with the stubborn Mandarins, inevitably causing more war. Hilariously, in cities like London and San Francisco, immigrant Chinese were scorned and feared for their spreading of the opium habit- ‘a heathen curse on Christendom,’ as Alan Moore satirically put it in his Victorian-era League of Extraordinary Gentlemen- when in reality, opium was outlawed and almost unknown in China before Britain fought two wars to be able to import it there.

And that’s where Flashman steps in. He soon becomes involved in his country’s efforts to negotiate (at the point of a bayonet, natch) with the Mandarins at Peking. One of the most interesting themes of the book (to an anti-colonial whelp like myself) is Flashy’s description of the Chinese at this time: arrogant, insolent and as racist as he is himself. What’s true is that before the mid-19^th century, China had existed in a kind of dream-world for centuries, believing itself to be literally the centre of the world (‘the middle kingdom’), with a god for an emperor.  It wasn’t until the First Opium War in the 1840’s that China was forced to accept that there were other powers in the world besides itself, and that it would sometimes have to respect those powers. But the belief that Westerners were sub-human barbarians (not aided, of course, by said wars) seems to have returned, and Fraser depicts them as treating the Westerners like scum, hampering their efforts every step of the way to Peking.

Now, my mindset would generally be that the Chinese had every right not to aid the British in getting their claws into the country. If they had any sense, they would obviously have seen what was happening in the rest of the world, and done everything they could to keep the foreigners out. But Frasier’s point here is that this policy was being proposed by a rotting structure of small-minded, bigoted Sino-centrists, to coin a phrase. And, to be fair, he goes a fair way towards convincing me that he has a point. If the Chinese had had a more realistic take on the world and its politics, perhaps they would have accepted a certain amount of trading (which was perhaps inevitable anyway) and played their advantage to maintain a more powerful position among the nations. Instead they were crushed and humiliated because they refused to accept the reality of the situation. As usual, Frasier manages to convince me at least that there is another side to the story, or that the nations crushed by the imperial powers didn't always behave like angels either.

There’s a very high level of Orientalism in the book too- quite enough to make Edward Said run crying to his harem. The Chinese court, and in particular the famous Summer Garden, are portrayed as being so alien as to be ‘not of this earth.’ It’s as evocative as it is convincing. I have a particular love for a slightly unreal take on exotic cultures, probably as a progression from my love of the alien worlds of science fiction when I was a kid. My heart sings as Flashman wanders through corridors of green jade and dragon temples, and however patronising it is, I will always love this kind of thing, even if I know that it's all slightly silly.

Something else I love about this book is that it’s one of the Flashman novels that really focuses on the history. While Flashy himself is the glue that holds the series together, I have always felt that the books fall apart whenever the emphasis is on too many of Frasier’s fictional characters or unlikely coincidences (I rather loathe fan-favourite John Charity Spring, for example). I far prefer the books in which Flashy is thrust through a series of real events, and Flashman And The Dragon is played almost completely straight in this regard. Almost all the impossible events that the anti-hero bumbles through really happened, which adds a certain frisson to the proceedings. The only serious fictional intrusion is Flashy’s dealings with the scheming Trooper Nolan (of note to those looking for the Irish connection!), which falls rather flat compared to the rest of the novel.

Alongside tantalising hints as to an elderly Flashman’s presence at the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and a brief walk-on part for ‘Chinese’ Gordon (whom Flashy seems to have come to know better later on- surely at Khartoum?), possibly the saddest missed opportunity here occurs at the very end of the book, when Flashman’s American contacts catch up with him, and shanghai him into what is surely the most lusted-after of Frasier’s unwritten books: the scoundrel’s adventures during the American Civil War.

Flashman And The Dragon is an epic adventure through a never-never-land that really was, and will likely introduce the reader to a world of extraordinary events and characters. Not to be missed.

King of the Cloud Forests by Michael Morpurgo

In empire-set fiction, a classic set-up for European folks living in exotic climes is to have the main characters be missionaries. Missionaries, by their very nature, go out into the wilds, spreading their own brand of Western interference exactly where it’s not wanted. In King of the Cloud Forests, the protagonist Ashley (oddly, Americans still insist on saddling male children with this most effeminate of names) is the son of a Christian missionary in a city in western China in the nineteen-thirties.

I read this book as a child (well, most of it) and it always stuck with me as being extremely odd. Though I never finished it, it lingered in my memory as that book with the yetis. An 80’s book, it’s considered a bit of a minor classic in children’s literature, and I originally found it in my school library, but because it takes place in a rather serious and grim time and place, it was never going to be the kind of thing I would have chosen to read as a child (I hated historical fiction then, and only wanted to read about the future and fantastic alien worlds), but I ploughed through because I knew that there was going to be some cryptozoological element. But I was to be somewhat disappointed…

Before I go any further, I’d like to note that the classic, haunting cover remembered from my childhood in which a mysteriously-shrouded figure makes its way through a howling snowstorm has been replaced in the Egmont Press edition by a CGI monstrosity. A horrible font, cheesy-as-feck ‘spooky staring eyes’ and a misshapen reject from a PS1 game wandering among the Himalayas made me almost not want to open the book. You may be ‘committed to ethical publishing’, Egmont, but Christ, get your act together regarding covers.

Anyway, the story opens with Ashley (heh heh) living a relaxed life with his father, his friends and a Himalayan helper named Uncle Sung. Reading the book now, I’m impressed at how the religious element is handled. Ashley’s father is a good man who’s devoted to his faith and helping others. Too often nowadays in all kinds of fiction, the religious character is a figure to pity or mock. But the religious debates that are very briefly touched on (it is a children’s book) raise unsettling questions about the possible conflict between faithfully observing religion and being a truly intelligent and moral person. It’s played very subtly- so subtly that I doubt even religious folk would find anything objectionable- but there’s just enough there to leave the door open for debate in the mind of an intelligent child reader (it obviously flew over my pre-teen head). I like the idea that Ashley’s father is still a good man even though his own worldview may not necessarily be very realistic. He’s also not portrayed as being any better or worse than the Buddhist Uncle Sung. Sung himself is something of a realist, remaining cynical about aspects of even his own religion. None of this is idle background, either; Morpurgo is working up to something big.

Then the Japanese invade. Reading his book the first time around is almost certainly the earliest memory I have of being aware of this terrible conflict. There’s no real detail about the war or why it’s happening, and young readers are spared any mention about the many, many Japanese war atrocities committed. Instead, the war is played as a plot-device to get Ashley and Uncle Sung to leave the city and head into the Himalayas, bound for Tibet and ultimately British India, where Ashley will get a boat to England.

The hardships of their journey also stuck with me for many years. It felt like an enormous, epic quest equal to The Hobbit. The two travel across plains and high into the snow-covered mountains. The landscape is vast and cruel, the hardships broken only by rest at the occasional house or monastery. Also introduced to me by this book was the idea of Tibet as being a seriously mystical place- Ashley and Sung encounter superstitious locals, including a llama who tells Ashley’s fortune. He claims that Ashley will be a ‘king of the cloud forests.’ Sung merely scoffs. They also come across legends of the yeti, the wildman who supposedly inhabit the mountains.

The friendship between the two travellers grows until, almost unbearably, Sung fails to return from a trip to gather supplies during a snow storm. Ashley holes up in a hut, waiting for Sung’s return. Instead, he gets a very different kind of visitor…

Ashley gets taken in by a tribe of yetis, and this is where it all went south for me as a child. I remember losing interest as soon as the beasts were revealed to be a lovable, caring bunch of critters. I wanted my crypto-creatures to remain mysterious, dammit! I never have had time for the ‘noble savage’ plot, and still find it boring today.

Anyway, Ashley has a lovely time living with the yetis, and over time he comes to know them all, giving them token cave-man type names (you know the kind of thing: One-Eye, Big-Leg, No-Face, etc). True to the noble savage stereotype, they know no anger or selfishness, and live in perfect harmony with their surroundings. He stays with them for almost a year until he realised that they pretty much worship him, and after their devotion causes a disaster to the tribe, he knows that he can no longer remain as a false God; he must leave. Ah, now it becomes obvious what all that religious sub-text was for earlier! It’s subtler than I’m making it sound, and Morpurgo definitely deserves credit for getting his point across naturally without any overt God-bashing.

I loved the scene where Ashley leaves the tribe during a goat-raid on a monastery. His first contact with humans in a year does not go well, and he realises that he will probably never feel the same towards his fellow man (or woman? The mind boggles) again. And to his credit, the author allows this trait to persist without sugar-coating it: Ashley is allowed to grow up as a somewhat isolated boy who, true to his experiences, never quite fits in and dreams of someday returning to his mountain idyll.

There’s also an odd reversal when Ashley meets a man who has come to wonder if the yetis are after all not a step above mankind, given that they have managed to live a ‘better’ lifestyle than we do and exist in a sort or unspoiled garden of Eden, thereby putting themon a sort of God-like pedestal. Even though the book finishes on a note of aching loss for this departed ‘paradise’, the subtext is clearly that revering anyone as a perfect being, and surrendering reason to such worship, is an act of folly.

I would certainly recommend King of the Cloud Forests for anyone who’s interested in challenging their children (or themselves) with a haunting story that raises some uncomfortable questions, and provides no easy answers.