THE PALACE OF HEAVENLY PLEASURE
By Adam Williams
Hodder & Stoughton, £15.99, 720pp
ISBN 0 340 82786 6
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They have joined the World Trade Organisation, and will host the Olympics in 2008. Yet the Chinese have not always been welcoming to the West. In 1900, under the slogan “Exterminate the Foreigners”, the Boxer Rebellion saw Western missionaries, diplomats and doctors murdered in unpleasant ways. Only a relieving Western army saved the day and secured what the West still wants — trade.
Because they practised martial arts, “Boxers” was the name contemporary Westerners gave to the rebels their Chinese name meant “Fists of Righteous Harmony”. This novel’s title is what its Western protagonists call the brothel — “that awful house of ill repute” — in their fictional town of Shishan. But what goes on there — the systematic sodomising of a missionary’s kidnapped son, sadomasochism, gun-running, drinking gallons of gaoliang wine and so on — is rather more terrestrial.
There is no principal character in this novel about China and its march to the forces of history. Instead, Williams marshals a complex cast. We have the decent Scottish doctor Edward Airton and his warm wife, the big-bosomed Nellie. Their two children, George and Jenny, are beautifully drawn. Airton is, or thinks he is, a friend of the local Mandarin, “a powerful man in every way”. Mother Liu runs the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure and tries to run her savage son, Ren Ren, who becomes a Boxer.
The dissolute, aristocratic Englishman Henry Manners is as close as Williams comes to caricature. He seduces the recently arrived and radiant redhead, Helen Frances Delamere, whose father is a debauched drunk, in due course dealt with by a Boxer, but not before Helen Frances has become an opium addict and pregnant, though not at the same time. Major Lin is the Mandarin’s mercenary. Several of the prostitutes at Mother Liu’s “palace” suffer at his hands, and Williams excels at engaging our sympathy for all “sisters of sorrow” enslaved to service and sex. One called Fan Limei, for example, lies “. . . . below his (Major Lin’s) body, shaking with silent sobs, the little girl she had once been calling to her from the emptiness inside her soul”.
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What Williams makes of his characters is a rattling good read. Full of love and loss and guts and gore and derring-do, this is as good as an adventure story gets. Some novelists are adept at driving a story on through dialogue, while others find narrative more natural. Williams is a master of both. This is his first novel, yet technically accomplished.
Beyond a cracking story, well conceived and executed, is there more? Yes, much. Williams, who lives in China, is the fourth generation of his family to do so. He knows the country and its culture as well as any Westerner. He excels in communicating China’s simultaneous similarity and strangeness. For example, he has Dr Airton and the Mandarin reading and discussing the Bible together. Airton thinks he is converting the Chinaman to Christianity. But in time the reader comes to wonder who is converting whom?
Entertaining, engaging and informative, this book deserves to do well. Yet the prose is nothing special, and when it touches on the “big issues” of life, death and the universe it does so simplistically. So is this a good novel, or a great one? Asked in 1974 about the importance of the French Revolution of 1789, the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai thought for a bit. “It is,” he replied eventually, “too soon to say.”
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