Tai-Pan: The Second Novel of the Asian Saga

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But it is mostly a shadowed figure sandwiched between an Anglo-centric storyline, no matter how much Dirk Struan asserts his admiration and assimilation to some, and in the pages of the book, very little, Chinese culture. Struan sees all the capitalist and military advantages of this once-in -a-lifetime deal, and sets up the trading colony of Honkers like his own little opium-dealing empire.

It is a wide ranging story about Western trade interests in China and the establishment of Hong Kong as a British colony. Enter James Clavell, from beyond the grave, holding a copy of his 1966 tome, wordlessly gesturing that I should get that into me. It is about the foundation of Hong Kong and a nice journey about the social life and customs of China at that time (19th century).

I usually will get kinda bored with most romances but there was a lot of that stuff in this one and I somehow got into it, which was surprising. This book raises the issues of Imperial trade, the duplicitousness of Opium smuggling, the strained heirachical positioning of both Chinese and Imperial British society and touches on many of the taboos and prejudices of the British community. Clavell was also an ardent supporter of Free Trade, an avowed opponent of Communism and Fascism and an admirer of certain aspects of both Asian and Western culture. Not the crappiest crap I've ever seen, but really - if an author has to repeat the same "foreign-flavor" word 4 times on one page, he clearly doesn't have the most innovative of spirits. This bothers me possibly more than it should, but it has made the process of going through the fairly large novel quite a bit more tiresome than it should have been, so I feel I should mention it here: Struan is Scottish, most other characters are English, a lot of them come from low economic backgrounds and the rest are Chinese.

We get a little bit of history about the Manchu invasion and the Qing dynasty but other than it’s pretty much epic (melo)drama about the British, Scots, Welsh, Americans etc. Though it took me a month to get through it (it was a very busy month and novel reading had to take a back seat) when I did sit down with it I would often go through fifty and sixty pages with no effort. James Clavell δεν έχει εκδοθεί (στο σύνολο του) στην χώρα μας, παρά μόνο σε ευτελείς εκδόσεις τσέπης, οι οποίες δεν χαίρουν εκτίμησης από μεγάλο μέρος του αναγνωστικού κοινού.At different points Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Steve McQueen were attached to the project, but negotiations fell through each time.

They spend a good portion of their time thinking to themselves how annoying it is that he is perfect and that they are weak. In 1805, at the age of seven, Dirk Struan began his nautical adventures as a powder monkey on a king's ship at the Battle of Trafalgar and he remains bound to the sea for life.Years passed and I tried Gai-jin - I only finished that because I constantly hoped that even turn of the page would somehow bring about the book's miraculous redemption.

Throughout the novel, both men seek to destroy each other in matters of business and personal affairs. I never felt like I couldn't put the book down or had to read to the end of a chapter because half the time I didn't even know what I was reading about. Compared to Shogun, which had a fair number of characters of about equal importance and each with their own plotlines that tied together fairly well, in Tai-Pan there's - as you can see - a far more clear single central protagonist, and a great many more plotlines, great and small, involving him: even the ones he didn't know or care about all come down to him in the end. There are better options, half a dozen at least of the women/girls he knows who would help to open more doors for him, but there is just one damn problem.

I think there is some confusion from my side on whether the whole saga is a super culturally insensitive western appropriation glorifying the poppy trade and if so, how do I admit that I really liked the story.