Not only is "Noble House" as long as life, it's also as rich with possibilities. For by the time you're halfway through this fourth installment in Mr. Clavell's fictional history of the Far East—the previous three entries in which were "King Rat," "Tai-Pan" and "Shogun"—there are so many irons in the fire that almost anything can plausibly happen. It may even be that Mr. Clavell himself loses track of his story. It seems to me that there's a spy or two whose fate is never resolved. And whatever happened to the threat of hepatitis that kept looming over some of the characters?

But for all its complexity of plot—and for all Mr. Clavell tries to teach us about local Hong Kong color, the Asian mind, the Chinese love of gambling, the wonders of free enterprise and the threat of the Soviet Union to the free world's security—what makes "Noble House" succeed as an adventure is really very simple. What makes the novel work is simply Ian Dunross, its profoundly middle-class hero.

You really have to hand it to Mr. Clavell. His storytelling is as clumsy as always, with its sudden and arbitrary shifts in point of view, its incredible self-motivating interior dialogues and its onstage whisperings that let you know that something important has happened without revealing yet precisely what. The dialogue is often pure comic-book, and some of the soliloquies are so wooden you could build a raft with them….

But despite the novel's many faults, Mr. Clavell is masterly at manipulating one's identification with Ian Dunross. And this identification occurs because Dunross, though he operates on a heroic scale, is basically the head of a household who, like Thornton Wilder's George Antrobus, is bringing home the bacon and protecting the women and children from the elements. It's interesting that despite the novel's purported anti-Puritanism in sexual matters, Ian Dunross is the only major male character who never comes close to having sex, even with his wife—though of course he's amusingly worldly about everyone else's peccadilloes. Yet we find ourselves rooting for Ian above all others, and even preferring him to characters much more like ourselves in their foibles and failings.

In short: "Noble House" isn't art. It isn't even slick. But it touches a number of nerves. And its scale is occasionally dizzying. At 1,200 pages, it's a book you can get lost in for weeks. In fact, some readers may disappear into it and never be heard from again. (p. 317)