[In the following review, Buruma discusses the metaphorical motifs and characteristic features of Mo's style in An Insular Possession.]

What will happen after 1997? This is the first thing people ask when one tells them that one lives in Hong Kong. It is not the sort of question posed about any other place. Who knows what will happen in 1997 in New York, Delhi, or Tokyo? But in no other place is the future tied to a specific date, to a formal agreement that a modern capitalist colony will be handed over to a troubled Communist state. Nor can one think of any other major city whose origin can be so clearly traced to a date. In the case of Hong Kong, the date is August 29, 1842, when the island was ceded to Britain in the Treaty of Nanking. (In fact several thousand British sailors and merchants had already moved there in 1839, having been forced to leave Canton.) An Australian journalist once called Hong Kong a borrowed place on borrowed time; but the time is now fixed. The cold chronological number gives people the illusion of certainty, the illusion that the future can be predicted.

This is the paradox of Hong Kong. Its future is both fixed and fluid, predictable and utterly uncertain. This contradiction between the roaring tide of history and the attempts by men to fix it, to make virtually scientific sense of it, is one of the key themes of Timothy Mo’s very clever novel [An Insular Possession]about the genesis of Hong Kong. The first sentence of the book introduces the main metaphor for the epic story that follows: “The river succors and impedes native and foreigner alike; it limits and it enables, it isolates and it joins.” The image of the river as the tide of history keeps on returning:

At least the river’s bars are a predictable ambush; they become submerged and exposed with the rise and fall of a tide but they do not change position. It is the river itself which is fickle and mischievous. It is never the same for longer than a season and in ten years will cut itself new channels, flood what was land, retreat from its bed to leave bird-haunted mud flats and strange smooth stones, create peninsulas and enisle what was once part of the main.

And on the final page of the novel, the hero of the story, a scholarly American called Gideon Chase, makes the metaphor explicit: “Treaties, Congresses, Conventions mean nothing, except to the participants—the stuff of history is less tangible, but lies in a popular mood whose ebbs and flows are not measurable by the month or year.”

In Asia, specifically Buddhist Asia, this image of the river sweeping away the illusions of man is a cliché, like the image of the man carrying the cross of his own destiny in Christian civilization. Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong and partly educated there. He writes in English and lives in London. He is thus the heir of two civilizations. And in his work the clichés of one are constantly challenged by those of the other.

On the surface of his story is the historical clash between two civilizations on the south China coast, which culminated in the first Opium War from 1840 to 1842. It was a war not just between Britain and China, but between the modern, pragmatic, mercantile, scientific, brave new world and the old, inward-looking middle kingdom ruled by the son of heaven, for whom barbarian foreigners could be tribute-bearers at best. That the brittle, self-contained Chinese world would collapse was inevitable; indeed, it had the inevitability of tragedy. That the British gave the first push was coincidental, as was the product over which the war was ostensibly fought: opium.

Mo, mainly through the eyes of two fictional American witnesses, the somewhat pompous Gideon Chase and his more facile friend Walter Eastman, sets the scene of the tragedy well. It is still an oddly familiar scene—the boredom of humid summers; the mediocrity of expatriate life; the high spirits of drunken young Englishmen abroad; the seediness of Old Hands visiting Chinese brothels; the comedy of manners at dance parties in Macao; the arrogance of Western merchants, cynically aware that both God and guns are on their side; the hypocrisy of the Americans, who condemn the ruthlessness of Europeans while profiting from it themselves; the bloodymindedness of Chinese officials, as yet ignorant of the forces they are dealing with. And the violent climax of the tragedy is described in the sort of vivid detail one would expect from a part-time boxing writer (which Mo is): the brutal slaughter of Chinese troops by Sepoys, brought over from India; the one-sided sea battles; the ghastly effect of a rocket blowing a Chinese ship sky high.

That rocket is a triumph of Western science:

Before Gideon’s horrified eyes, a human arm, including the hand and fingers, suddenly lands with a heavy thump, failing to bounce. He cannot believe what his eyes have seen. He turns to Pedder, but the first lieutenant is concentrating on the next target. Captain Hall surrenders his place at the rocket-tube to the weapon’s designated operator. Crouch looks as stunned as if the rocket has hit him, which, in a manner of speaking, it has. “There, there … do you see …” is all Gideon can manage.

“Interesting effect, Mr. Crouch. I’m sure you’re in agreement.”

“Prodigious. The destructive power is extraordinary—but the more so the accuracy. I could not believe a rocket might be so precisely delivered.”

Science anesthetizes the senses; one is reminded of bomber crews pushing digital buttons over big cities. And the rocket is compared at one point in the story with another scientific invention of the time, the camera: “To the surviving Chinese, scattering on the bank, the brass lens has all the appearance of the barrel of a new and still deadlier weapon of war (which perhaps it is), the more destructive for its small size and apparently innocuous body.”

As a kind of parallel stream to the main river of Mo’s narrative, there is a continuous rivalry between Walter Eastman, the photographer, and an old Irish painter named O’Rourke. Both depict the same events, one by fixing them in time, the other by interpreting them through his imagination—the world of science against the world of myths and legends:

On one hill: silent, orderly red lines, glinting with brass and blanco, neat field-batteries of howitzers and rockets unlimbering and forming, discipline and science, hierarchy and professionalism. On the other: a shapeless crowd, waving motley weapons, spilling down the slope and into the valley. Ardor and vehemence. Enthusiasm, spontaneity.

Much of Mo’s story is told through newspaper accounts. The irony of it is that he made up the newspaper accounts. Even the potted biography of Gideon Chase, which appears in the appendix, among the biographies of actual historical figures, is a product of Mo’s imagination. He has imagined history by entering into the language of the past. Indeed, the entire book—its length, its epic scenes, its social comedy, its moral sermonizing, its almost baroque intricacy—can be read as a comment on the Victorian novel, as kind of postmodern Thackeray. Perhaps irony is the only weapon left to those who live by the imagination in a world bombarded by facts, journalism, and scientific information.

The problem for this postmodern novel, like the problem of postmodernism itself, is that it rarely, if ever, gets beyond cleverness. The point is made over and over again. Mo does not always know when to leave well enough alone. He is so cerebral, so concerned with style, that he cuts his work off from passion, without which art has no life. This novel so full of blood is also rather anemic. It is as if Mo does not really care about his characters except as figures in the landscape of his ideas, to be picked up and discarded like the flat leather puppets in a Javanese shadow play. And if the author does not care, why should the reader? This is not to say that the puppets, or the characters, need to look real; but they must be real at least in the context of their fictional world. Even that degree of reality is undermined by Mo’s relentless irony, leaving a brilliant exercise in style and little else.

Art about art is the product of over-civilization. It is particularly popular now in British writing and art-house cinema, produced by a small, gifted coterie of which Mo is a member. It is also very much in the classical tradition of Chinese literati, those refined amateur connoisseurs whose allusions to other works of art were like codes that only they could understand. The last appendix of Mo’s book is an “excerpt” from the “unpublished memoirs” of Gideon Chase. In it he makes the following statement:

The effect produced by photography upon painting, it now seems to me, in the latest work of France, has been to isolate the artist from the public, to make our modern painter insular, private, abstracted, to free him from the tiresome representation of the surface of things, but also to exile him to a realm where taste and knowledge are the private possession of the craft. Their work, treating still in its way of the world we all inhabit and in which we have our being, assembles nothing so much as a cryptic code to the outsider, a message and description of the mundane world, but couched in a cipher to which only an elite hold the key.

One could not wish for a better description of Mo’s novel. It is a truly insular possession.