[In the following review, Wilson describes the stylistic qualities of Mo’s prose in An Insular Possessionwhile also presenting an account of the novel's plot and setting.]

Timothy Mo’s long-awaited new novel, five years in the making, begins with a lyrical description of the Pearl River and the city of Canton which will demand inclusion in any future treasury of modern English prose. This is Mo at his best, using language as a fluent conveyor of all the eye can see, the ear can hear, the mind can imagine—language lean yet poetic, down-to-earth yet conscious of the sky.

After that we have something more difficult: an attempt to recreate some of the life along, upon and beside that river in the years of the Opium War when dynamic British and decadent Chinese power clashed, resulting in Britain’s acquiring that “insular possession,” Hongkong.

Mo has a Cantonese father, an English mother and a Hongkong birthplace: whom is more suitable to pen a great epic uncovering a rich clash of cultures and suggesting, as only a good novel can, the plurality of motive and diversity of individual character that rescue such episodes of history from the strait-jacket of political myth-making? It is somewhat, perhaps, like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which Mo admires so much.

But it is not that kind of magnum opus at all. An Insular Possession is a long and unhurried book which, far from interpreting events, merely paints a background against which historical events could have taken place, using for heroes two American journalists and a drunken Irish painter on the fringe of affairs. Their idle chatter over breakfast, their struggles with the latest photographic invention (daguerreotype), their adventures in boats, their lively comments on the mores and foibles of the Chinese and Europeans around them, a duel, their pet dog, a cricket match—these are the matters of Mo’s book. Only briefly do we become involved in actual Anglo-Chinese fighting, when one of the Americans is pressed into service as an interpreter.

To this end the author performs the technical triumph of writing in the English of the 1840s. Mo has adopted Dickensian turns of phrase, and words like epicanthic, homunculi, cloaca, enisled and thrasonical, to cite examples from the first few pages. Mo’s research in both matter and form is extraordinarily thorough.

Mo confesses that he finds narrative-writing boring, and in the middle of this book he drops a hint of what he is really up to, distinguishing between the Western novel (which unfolds linearly, with a strong plot carrying it to a firm conclusion) and the Chinese novel (whose path is circular, emphasising incident, character and language). The former is a river, conscious of time progressing, the latter a lake lacking either tense or perspective. One takes the individual as hero, the other the group. The reader is thus warned not to expect anything so crude as a moral or an analytical structure in An Insular Possession.

The book is great fun to browse and dip into. I shall not forget the newspaper “resourcefully ironed crisp against the humidity,” or the comment on early converts: “Their Christian zeal was greatest at meal-times.” But the nearest we get to politics is Commissioner Lin securing through an intermediary an American missionary doctor’s truss for his hernia, or someone’s stricture on opium: “How many a ruler leaves his subject in thrall to … a lump of brown sap? Better to be a man’s slave than an object’s.” Old China hands will smile at the description of Canton as the sphincter of the Chinese empire through which life-sustaining fluids are drained overseas.

This is a good book in which to lose yourself, to gain an insight into what the world of 1840 might have looked like to people “neutral” as between China and Europe. But do not look for history in the formal sense, or for big ideas.

Mo is always tantalising us with newly displayed gifts. After the uproarious comedy of contemporary Chinese life in Hong Kong and Britain, The Monkey King and Sour Sweet, he has now extended his range to China, albeit an old China, and to Western heroes, albeit on the edge of public affairs.