Tai-Pan

Tai-Pan – by James Clavell

Book 2 of James Clavell’s ‘Asian Saga’ series. In case you’re wondering, these books are numbered not in the order that they were written, but in the order of the time period in which each book takes place.  Book 1, Shogun, takes place about 250 years before this one, but was written about a decade later.  Since I’ve read Shogun, it’s almost impossible to write a review of Tai-Pan without making comparisons.  In a nutshell, this book isn’t nearly as good as Shogun, but it still gets a 5-star A-plus rating from me.

Billed as “The Epic Novel of the Founding of Hong Kong”. I felt that moniker is basically true, but I found it a tad misleading. I didn’t really feel any sort of connection with Hong Kong and what this new city had the potential of becoming, but that could be my lack of knowledge in Asian history. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this novel could have been about the founding of any city and it still would have been engrossing.  There’s a lot of story here – about 750 pages, yet I honestly felt as though this novel should have been about twice that long. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a masochist; and most novels of this length are about all the average reader can take, but there was just so much here that could have been expounded upon.  In fact, the entire first chapter seems to be the summary of a previous book.  Not surprisingly, it’s the longest chapter in the book (about 80 pages on an e-book, probably a bit shorter in the printed format), and had the author had it in him, he could have written a prequel describing all of the events that lead up to the ‘beginning’ of this story.

The year is 1841, and our protagonist Dirk Struan is a Scottish trader capitalizing on the sea faring trade in China. He’s the head of the Noble House of his trading company – hence his title ‘Tai-Pan’. Struan is an everyman’s hero.  He’s incredibly handsome, charming, kind, and outsmarts everyone around him. Some critics claim his character is a bit unbelievable, and they’re right, but with a book as great as this one, it’s a minor sin. With trading being such a relevant occupation of the time, this position is quite the honor and the story revolves around him, the government, his rivals, and his family.  Most of his real family his back home in Scotland, but, with him, is a son, a concubine (named May-May), and a step-son (from another concubine). Someday, Struan plans to pass the role of ‘Tai-Pan’ over to his son, but his son isn’t nearly as smart as dad, and is quite content with admitting that he doesn’t think he’s up for the job. Struan’s main rival is a competitor named Tyler Brock who seems to ooze evil and treachery throughout the pages. Of course, things get really interesting when Struan’s son and Brock’s daughter fall in love and want to get married.

There’s so much more plot, more sub stories and more characters other than what I’ve just described, but it’s not necessary to describe it all. In addition, it would be quite overwhelming.  There’s a lot of 19^th century Chinese culture as well, although you never quite feel immersed in it as much as you did with the Japanese culture when reading Shogun. Again, I wish this book would have been longer.

I would be lying if I said I understood every single point and every single motivation of the book and its characters.  I never really quite comprehended the ‘4 coins’ agreement when Struan gets desperate and turns to the aging wealthy native for help. It’s also a bit of a challenge when the author writes his character’s dialogue in their native tongue. It’s hard enough trying to understand what Chinese characters are saying in broken English, but it also took awhile to assimilate Struan’s rough Scottish brogue when he’s always using the word ‘nae’ instead on ‘no’, ‘na’ instead of ‘not’, and ‘dinna ken’ instead of ‘don’t know’.  There’s also a lot of different ships (with names) and a lot of ports within the pages for the reader to juggle. 

This is one of those books that I think would make an outstanding mini-series. I would love to see this magnificent story in addition to reading about it. Sadly, it was made into an awful move (so I’m told) sometime in the 1980s, but perhaps someone with more talent will take another stab at it.

I’m very glad to have discovered James Clavell, and eagerly look forward to reading the remaining books of the Asian saga.