[In the following review of An Insular Possession, Enright provides an outline of the historical facts in Mo's narrative and assesses Mo's fictional rendition.]

An Insular Possession is a historical novel of so traditional a kind as to seem startlingly original. The history concerns British trade with China and the so-called Opium War of 1839–42, embracing the seizure of Hong Kong by Britain in 1841. China was convinced that Westerners needed her rhubarb to cure the constipation characteristic of all barbarian bowels, but she didn't particularly want cotton in exchange. The West was after China's silver, as well as her tea, and the solution was to turn her into a society of consumers, or addicts, situated at a safe distance from home. Still a sore point with the Chinese, that bizarre war is virtually forgotten by us, partly because in retrospect it is both shameful and absurd, not to say indefensible, although at the time the sale of Indian opium, by force and by guile, was commonly considered absolutely essential to the Empire. When the trade ceased, Britain and its Empire continued to exist: essentials are rarely what they profess to be.

The first pages of the novel sketch the setting: the Pearl River, with its cargo of dead female babies, of barges and bandits, and Canton itself, already “an ancient place with a dubious and blood-stained past”, and a cosmopolitan city, blessed with a mosque and the tomb of one of the Prophet’s uncles, and also the Factories or trading posts of the East India Company, the “Honourable Company”. Thereafter we meet three of the main characters, Harry O’Rourke, the local painter, a Dickensian creation with a red bulbous nose and “plenilunar buttocks”, and the two young Americans, Walter Eastman and Gideon Chase, at present employees of the American house of Meridian and Co, which trades furs, sandalwood and birds’ nests in exchange for silk, porcelain, lacquer and tea, eschewing the “fabulously profitable traffic” in what is quaintly called “drug”.

Eastman is excitable, choleric and witty; Chase is gentle and serious-minded, even to the point of learning the Chinese language surreptitiously from one Master Ow, a disaffected mandarin with a taste for cherry brandy. Chase will later achieve great things as an interpreter to high figures of state and as a professor of Chinese in numerous universities. Or so—it is practically impossible to distinguish between fact and fabrication—an appendix informs us.

Timothy Mo’s primary allegiance is to history, to the past experienced as though it were the present, and hence he needs to make his characters lifelike and engaging. And so they are. To some extent they come from stock, not very deeply plumbed but representative: the boisterous Company clerk, younger son of a good but impecunious family; the cynical yet soft-hearted old hand; the stern pragmatic merchant; the bluff naval officer; the harassed envoy from London; the proper young lady from Boston, more bored than fascinated; the comical native servant. This suits the author’s aims, and one wouldn’t expect to find a Lucky Jim at the court of His Celestial Majesty or a Leopold Bloom on the Select Committee of Supercargoes.

The social life of expatriate Westerners is entertainingly documented. For instance, duck-shoots and boating parties; the smuggling into bachelor quarters of native prostitutes (an activity mentioned but not enacted); outdoor sketching; a visit to The Barber of Seville performed by a touring Italian company; a ball with fireworks to celebrate the American Fourth of July; and amateur dramatics, that perennial pastime of exiles: here a production of The Rivals, with O’Rourke in the part of Mrs Malaprop and with the customary prima donnas and injured feelings.

The novel is rather low on romantic interest, apart from Eastman’s unsuitable love for his boss’s niece, promptly quashed by her heavily Victorian uncle; yet we shall hardly reproach Mo for passing light-heartedly over the goings-on in a “flower-boat” managed by a fat eunuch under the protection of the Brotherhood of Rovers of Rivers and Lakes. Humorous touches abound. Two Americans, captured by a “Tartar general,” are hard pressed to convince him of their nationality: he contends that if they are not English then they should speak a different language and wear different clothes. The mandarins translate the name of Lord Napier, briefly Superintendent of British Trade on the dissolution of the Honourable Company’s monopoly in China, in such a way as to suggest “Laboriously Vile”. Commissioner Lin, dispatched by the Emperor to put down the trade in opium, has need of the services of the American missionary hospital in Canton but protocol forbids him to visit it in person. He sends a discreet intermediary who describes the symptoms: Dr Parker diagnoses a hernia and furnishes a truss of the approximate dimensions. This story, taken from the contemporary Chinese Repository, is related in Arthur Waley’s The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes.

Eastman is revolted by the “noxious traffic” in opium, paradoxically carried on by the nation that led the way in suppressing the traffic in slaves, and whose commercial representatives piously argue that free trade is “hallowed work” which will bring backward China into intercourse not only with the rest of mankind but also with “our Maker”. When Meridian and Co decide to join in this secure and lucrative trade on the grounds that moral misgivings must yield to the claims of their investors, Eastman and Chase resign, the former to found an anti-opium newspaper, the latter to help him and to act as interpreter to the British Plenipotentiary, Captain Elliott, in his dealings with the Chinese authorities. It was Captain Charles Elliot[t] who secured the cession of Hong Kong, to the grave dissatisfaction of Lord Palmerston, whose sights were set on something better than “a barren Island with hardly a House upon it”. He fares more favourably at Mo’s hands than at Waley’s; in the event, both the Captain and Commissioner Lin, Waley’s hero, were sacked, each of them for displaying excessive moderation vis-à-vis the other.

It isn’t misconception or prejudice that Timothy Mo must contend against, but sheer, large-scale ignorance. I found his pedagogy both serviceable and painless—and never mind the occasional squeak of chalk on blackboard. A high-flying article, obviously by Chase, in Eastman’s Lin Tin Bulletin and River Bee is encyclopaedic on the subject of Chinese literary modes. The Chinese tale “is bud, flower, and then compost, but as a growth of nature is never subject to the laws and dictates of mechanism”, for the language lacks tenses and therefore events unfold “directly and without mediation before the reader’s very eyes”. Moreover, though all novels are vulgar and frivolous and not to be compared with works of history or philosophy, Chinese fiction is “more emancipate” and more truly vernacular than American, in that American writers, wearing as it were imposed pigtails of the mind, are still in thrall to the literary models and prejudices of the Old World.

Political events and military movements are largely conveyed through the pages reproduced from the Canton Monitor and later the Lin Tin Bulletin. The Monitor is the organ of the mercantile establishment, crying out for tougher measures against the “jealous Celestials” and mocking “Cousin Jonathan” from across the Atlantic, in a mixture of jingoism, hypocrisy, hard business sense, and a fearfully arch would-be literariness:

The forces of darkness and prejudice must be cut down to make a way for the agents of improvement. It is, we would remind our readers, some of whom, following their experience of shifting for themselves, may find the analogy unusually pertinent, impossible to make an omelette without first breaking eggs. We, it must frankly be owned, cannot wait to see the great Chinese Humpty Dumpty given a forceful shove off his wall of secrecy and deceit and broke all to pieces. Not all the Emperor’s men shall put him together again.

Though a stout champion of free trade, excluding “drug”, the Lin Tin Bulletin—ironically named after the island where the opium hulks are moored—is sympathetic towards the Chinese, and prints sketches of native life, of Verminous Tse, the King of the Beggars, and Sour Li, the pickle vendor: topics scorned by the Canton Monitor. The Bulletin reports looting and raping by sepoys during an action outside Canton, while the Monitor states that “The men in general behaved very well.” Later in the proceedings the Bulletin deplores the debauchery following the British occupation of Hong Kong (that new settlements do not inevitably attract brutal and licentious characters is proved by the first settlers of New England), and we are surprised to find the Monitor, now the Hong Kong Guardian and Gazette, in agreement with its rival for once: “The morality of Hong Kong continues to give rise to concern.” The next issue corrects “morality” to “mortality”.

“Oh printing! What troubles hast thou brought mankind!” runs the Bulletin’s motto. In its first issue, dated January 3, 1838, the paper reports the death of Pushkin and, a trifle prematurely, the coronation of Queen Victoria. And its editor is reproached by Chase for referring to the “Yangtse Kiang River”, since “Kiang” means “river”: an amusing anticipation of the solecism committed by Ezra Pound in his rendering of a line by “Rihaku”, better known as Li Po, “the narrows of the river Kiang”. However, Eastman turns out to be no mean journalist, summing up the casus belli, nine months later, in magisterial tones. By placing the onus for the suppression of the opium trade on the Chinese government, “Britannia has the best of all worlds: she gets the lucre, yet washes her hands of all moral responsibility. We do not think this can continue.”

The period flavour in the speech of the Westerners is managed well, though the prose of the two newspapers can be oppressively orotund. But all this provides an effective contrast with the coolness of the sparing authorial voice:

Secret. Palace memorials circulate; the Emperor annotates in scarlet ink. High-minded censors, busy-bodies, ambitious time-servers sensing the imperial inclination, Confucian saints of a rectitude which is uncompromising to the point of mania, cranks, gentlemen essayists of leisure on their family estates—all have their pronouncements, panaceas ranging from the draconian if undeniably effective (execute all addicts) to the intelligent if unstomachable (buy all the drug and burn it). Very soon the Emperor is as sick of this torrent of paper as he is of the foreigners and their torrent of muck.

And likewise it gives edge to the account of the little things, the “minor pinpricks”, that build up into racial contempt and hostility: the foreigner’s cook takes 10 per cent of the accordingly enhanced price charged by the fruitseller, and the foreigner despises the Chinese for their petty cheating while the Chinese despise the foreigner who is stupid enough to allow himself to be diddled.

Timothy Mo shows us events mostly through Western eyes, the eyes of people we soon come to esteem or at least understand. Perhaps he is paying a discreet and timely tribute to his birth-place, Hong Kong, rudely appropriated but efficiently run, by and large, along principles similar to Charles Gould’s in Nostromo. Law and order grow out of material interests, which in turn are best served by law and order. That Eastman and Chase are Americans, with early American ideals, serves to bring out British excesses, and Mo contrives indirect reminders through such quiet narrative comments as—of a minor gunboat action—“Miraculously, no one is hurt (except Chinese, that is) …”. The fighting is confused and disjointed—as was everything in this anomalous affair, much of it half-hearted and inflamed by considerations of “face” as well as of money—but the skirmishes by land and by sea are graphically recounted. Mo represents the British soldiery as brave men engaged in a wrongful cause, and Commissioner Lin (through Eastman’s judicious editorial eyes) as both high-minded and high-handed, unjust in his means though noble and right in his ends. We can imagine what boring rant against imperialism and the unholy trinity of flag, Bible and merchantman the theme would provoke in some writers.

The Chinese Repository—to which, Waley says, we owe much of our knowledge of the period—was edited by two Americans, Elijah Bridgman (who makes a brief graveside appearance in the novel) and Wells Williams. They might conceivably be the originals of Eastman and Chase, though their magazine was a missionary enterprise, and the Bulletin seems closer to the Canton Press, the organ of the anti-opium party. The kidnapping in 1840 of Vincent Stanton actually happened: Mo makes him a BA (Oxon) and a Reverend, whereas Waley ascribes him to Cambridge, though degreeless and, at this stage, unordained. Harry O’Rourke may well be based on George Chinnery, a painter residing in Macao at the time; Chinnery was described by a contemporary as “fascinatingly ugly”, while O’Rourke claims “the distinction of being the ugliest man in Macao”; both were given to alarming facial distortions. O’Rourke is happily unmarried, and Chinnery was on the run from his wife. In the novel, a Chinese portrait painter by the name of Lumqua, competing with O’Rourke, advertises his services in the Canton Monitor; Waley mentions a Chinese painter, Lamqua, who took lessons in the European style from Chinnery and modelled “Commissioner Lin and his Favourite Consort” for Madame Tussaud’s.

The nature or constitution of this mix of fact and fiction, of imagination and documentation, is irrelevant to the novel as a “good yarn”, but bears directly on what I take to be part of the author’s intention, hinted at in the essay on Chinese literary modes and what it says about the absence of any “sense of recession or distance from the past, or superiority to it”. Too much invention, or too little authenticity, would betray a presumed superiority.

An Insular Possession is surely longer than it really needs to be. Excellent though it is to meet the past in the shape of instant and vivid reporting, too much space is given to the minutely detailed extracts from the press. Here Mo’s conscientiousness has got the better of his discretion. Eastman’s enthusiasm for photography, evinced in his published tips for practitioners, grows tedious, and (however true to Eastman’s habit of fierce indignation) the duel between the rival editors seems gratuitous. Even so, there are no obvious candidates for deletion on the usual grounds of cheapness, ingratiation, pretentiousness or plain bad writing—which is a remarkable achievement in a book of this size.