I could not finish An Insular Possession either…

   I spent the last three weeks trying to get into An Insular Possession, Timothy Mo’s novel about the 1839-1842 Opium war, a conflict between Britain and China which originated from diplomatic tensions caused by the trade of opium in Canton and Macau. Yet, despite all my efforts, I could not get into the book, and I dropped off after just three hundred pages, not even halfway through… Historical fiction is one of my favorite literary genres, and I was initially more than eager to immerse myself into this story of two Americans working for one of the trading houses who participated in the opium business. The first chapter looked promising, with its beautiful and picturesque description of the Pearl river as a symbolic highway of history, life and commerce.  Yet, after a few pages, I felt annoyed by the absence of a plot. I kept on turning the pages, but what I was reading looked more like a loose collection of events rather than a constructed narrative with a sense of progression.  I was also annoyed by interruptions from the long, stern, tangled and pompous articles from The Canton Monitor, a pro-British newspaper which the author uses as a means to convey a sense of the bias and tension between the British and Chinese communities. In the end, after I realized how much I disliked reading it, the book simply fell from my hands.

   In this review of Timothy Mo’s book in the New York Times, Robin W. Winks draws upon an essay from the newspaper founded by the two American characters of the novel to explain the differences between the Western and the Chinese novel: whereas a Western novel moves by virtue of its plot, ”a veritable engine which advances the tale along its rails to a firm destination, […] the native novel … moves in a path which is altogether circular,” being made up of separate episodes joined only by the loosest threads. Maybe I am just too much of a Western reader to fully appreciate Timothy Mo’s writing.