Noble House

James Clavell was a WONDERFUL Writer (yes, with a capital W) and NOBLE HOUSE was a gift he left to us! Through his eyes we visit Hong Kong in the 1970's. Clavell, like a virtuoso connaisseur of the human condition he is, manages to interweave a multitude of stories into a continuous carpet of a city living fast, taking risks, winning and loosing but never giving up. Heads of huge conglomerates on the verge of foundering - yet never letting go of their rival's throat; dirt-poor Chinese maids striking it rich by a sudden turn of their joss; photographer-Wo and his trophy collection; drug-running smugglers asking for favors-you-can't-refuse; cold war spy networks riddled with double and triple agents; an American stock-market runner trying his hand in raiding Hong Kong companies; ladies getting "pillowed", men getting wooed, fortunes made and lost in the 10 days these all take place. Will the Noble House survive? To quote Balzac, behind every great fortune lies crime. To prove him right, Noble House is but a thinly veiled reference to Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd, a real company. Anticlimactically for an historic British company operating in China, it is nowadays incorporated in Bermuda - and trying to forget its opium-running past (like so many City of London companies respectable today yet founded on drugs and dead natives). All these stories are presented masterfully, without ever loosing the reader's interest or dropping the ball of building tension. There were less than a dozen writers who could do this - starting with Homer. My copy was so worn I had to replace it. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! PS: There is a 1988 TV mini series based on this book - of comparable merit. (The mini-series are currently available only on VHS). The major casting was excellent (having suave Pierce Brosnan and beastly John Rhys-Davies go head-to-head was a stroke of genius). Although it run for 6 hours total, it barely scraped the surface of the complex story-lines. Truly beautiful production. Nevertheless, my advice is to first read the book and only THEN watch the TV version.

Ian Dunross, in a driving torrential rain, arrives at the Struan Building in Hong Kong. There he meets with Alastair Struan, the current tai pan (ultimate ruler) of the Noble House. At this meeting Struan confers the title of tai pan on Dunross and he must take an oath to uphold the traditions and oaths established by the first tai pan and founder of the Noble House, Dirk Struan, one of the first and certainly the mightiest of the China Traders from the early 19th century. At this meeting Dunross discovers that a ship containing a disproportionate amount of the Noble House's uninsured wealth has gone down imperiling the House's future. The book then jumps forward three years, to August of 1963, and the Noble House's financial predicament has grown, if anything, worse. Linc Bartlett, an American billionaire, and his ambitious and stunningly beautiful protégé, K. C. Tcholok arrive in Hong Kong aboard his private Boeing 707 (remember this is 1963). They are in Hong Kong to establish a presence in the lucrative Oriental markets and to make a deal with the Noble House or one of its competitors. Hidden in the wheel-well of the jet are rifles, ammunition, and grenades which are strictly prohibited in Hong Kong. Their origin as well as their purpose is revealed to us gradually as we come to know the protagonist and current tai-pan, Ian Dunross and the multitude of complex problems that he must contend with. We discover early on that there is a Judas Iscariot in the Noble House, the comprador Phillip Chen's son, John Chen, who is inexplicably kidnapped. Bartlett is playing the Noble House against it's arch-enemy and biggest competitor, Rothwell-Gornt run by Quillan Gornt, a descendant of Tyler Brock who is the arch-enemy of the first tai-pan, Dirk Struan. Gornt is using his former mistress, Orlanda Ramos, to spy on Bartlett and to manipulate him into a favorable disposition toward his company. Ian Dunross has a highly secret source of intelligence named Alan Medford Grant from a London Strategic Planning Institute and one of his reports to the tai-pan is intercepted by Roger Crosse of Hong Kong Special Intelligence. Shortly afterwards Grant turns up dead in England as a result of foul play. The information in Grant's reports are yet another important element in the complex tale crafted by Clavell. We learn from the report that the Noble House has a Russian mole within and that there is a mole high up in the Hong Kong government. Nearly every rivalry and association has its roots in the past dating back to at least the original China traders of the early 19th century. Clavell does a marvelous job of integrating the past and the present drawing on his knowledge not only of China and the Orient, but of high finance with repeated references to Sun Tzu's "Art of War." Even some of the characters from Clavell's marvelous "King Rat" make an appearance. The King himself does not appear and is only alluded to, but Robin Grey, as a lab

It's 1963. Hong Kong business conglomerate Noble House teeters on its foundations, dangerously close to collapse. With enemies and fair-weather friends on all sides vying for a chunk of the fallout rubble, Ian Dunross Struan, tai-pan of the Noble House, must somehow wheel and deal his way into at least twenty million dollars to pay off his debts and save his inheritance. But the tai-pan's struggle is just the surface layer of story, for in _Noble House_ James Clavelle weaves an incredible amount of subplots and historical tangents into a seamless whole-a massive tome that should give the consistent reader many hours of entertainment. Included in this week and a half of Hong Kong history: cold war espionage, bank failures and hostile takeovers, stock market fluctuations, drug smuggling, kidnapping, murder, high-price concubines and the men that desperately seek to please them, horse racing with enormous sums on the line, and the ever-present threat of a sudden typhoon or earthquake to interrupt everyone's fun and put things in perspective. _Noble House_ is structured in the typical novel format, being a slow, steady rise of tension and the continual addition of complications, always building the conflict and potential consequences, until release: climax and conclusion. Keeping the reader interested in both plot and characters over 350+ thousand words shows great skill on the part of the author. But what impressed me most about _Noble House_ were Clavelle's insights into the human condition: the fallible, fragile nature of both interpersonal and professional relationships; the overpowering lure of greed and lust; the strong contrasts in eastern and western thought processes. Besides the (literally) enormous entertainment found herein, the cultural and socio-political information in itself makes _Noble House_ a worthy read.Interestingly, Claville predicts the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union by detailing the basic flaw in their world policy: spending vast amounts of borrowed capital on military and subversive activities while the infrastructure of the country crumbled away thanks in no small part to poor maintenance and the stifling of innovation. Given that this book was written in 1981, during one of the peaks of the so-called "cold war," Clavelle's hints and insinuations resonate with a twenty-first-century hindsight.Recommended.

This book makes a leap of one century from Clavell's _Gai-jin_, and presents an interesting look at the culture and economy of Hong Kong. I cannot say how accurate it is except in one respect: passion for gambling. Having worked for years with natives of Hong Kong I believe Clavell has captured this aspect well.What Clavell does best with _Noble House_ is to maintain a high suspense level. Every character in the book could die; one must wait a long time to find out how it's going to turn out. Most of the characters are interesting enough. Just the shenanigans involved with the Hong Kong economy would make this a worthwhile read.