Insular Possession (Picador Books)

Leisurely may be the best word to describe this novel set during the first Opium War and the founding of the British settlement at Hong Kong. Timothy Mo takes his time letting us get to know Gideon Chase and Walter Eastman and a large cast of traders, artists, debutantes and warriors who shared a cocooned existence in the trading enclaves of Canton, Macao and Hong Kong in the late 1830s and early 1840s. In this novel and others (The Monkey King and Sour Sweet), Timothy Mo displays a deep love of the characters he creates. He revels in their eccentricities, enjoys their friendships, understands and forgives their imperfections. Mo's writing powers are astounding. He can craft 79-word sentences that work. He slyly conveys Eastman and Chase's shared idealism and deep friendship simply by reproducing an expense ledger that shows they have agreed to equal pay in a business venture, despite holding different ranks. There are other subtle touches. An offhand observation that Chase will grow increasingly embittered and isolated after the year 1872 may (or may not) be explained by a biographical footnote at the end of the book; the uncertainty is intriguing. Mo's research was rigorous. He writes powerful and convincing accounts of bloody battles and describes a terrifying shipwreck. But An Insular Possession is not an easy read. Much of the narrative is expressed in dialogue and excerpts from newspapers, rendered in the language of the times. This reader (easily befuddled, it's true) occasionally got lost, wrongly thinking at one point that Eastman and Chase were about to fight each other in a duel and confusing two characters at another. I also began to wonder what Mo was trying to say here. The novel flows from one incident to another -- some of them amusing and intimate, others on a sweeping epic scale - without really leading anywhere in particular. But then, that seems to be Mo's point (or one of them) - that life and history drift through episodes, the underlying meanings of which remain elusive or nonexistent. In the end, Mo just invites us to spend time with engaging characters during a tumultuous period in history. That's enough.