[In the following review, Yardley comments on Mo’s narrative skills and characterizes the author's shortcomings.]

The ways of book publishing being as they are, the immensely gifted young British writer Timothy Mo made his American debut two years ago not with his first novel but his second: Sour Sweet, an irresistible book about a Chinese family living in London and learning—among many other things—how to cope with the alien Western culture. Sour Sweet was enthusiastically reviewed in this country, acquired a small but ardent readership, and aroused much curiosity about Mo’s first novel, provocatively if enigmatically titled The Monkey King.

Now that curiosity can be satisfied. Mo’s first novel and his third, An Insular Possession, have been simultaneously published by two American houses. They turn out to be works of strikingly different character, though both deal with Mo’s persistent theme of East-West cultural dissimilarities. Readers who took pleasure in Sour Sweet will find themselves in familiar territory in The Monkey King, another novel about Chinese domestic life. An Insular Possession, on the other hand, is a sprawling, ambitious historical novel whose central characters are Americans and whose narrative method is calculatedly—indeed, almost ostentatiously—old-fashioned.

An Insular Possession is to be admired not merely for its ambition but also for Mo’s apparent determination not to repeat himself, but to venture into new and risky territory. The Monkey King and Sour Sweet, though different in many particulars, have much in common: not merely does each depict a Chinese family coming to terms with the West, but each is about a marriage that begins with discomfort and suspicion yet slowly warms into mutual respect and even love; further, each is written with a deft blend of affection and wry dispassion that produces a jaunty, distinctive tone. Each book is certainly an original; but were one to read the two consecutively, it would be easy to conclude that Mo is a writer of limited range.

Of the two, Sour Sweet is the more accomplished and confident—as would reasonably be expected of any writer’s second book—but The Monkey King is considerably more than mere apprentice work. It tells the story of how Wallace Nolasco, a Hong Kong Portuguese, marries into the Poon family and learns to cope with its mysterious ways; like Sun Wu Kung, “legendary king of the monkeys,” Wallace manages “to get himself out of the trouble he got into in the end.” His story involves labyrinthine complications, both financial and marital, but it comes right in the end; not merely does Wallace reach an understanding of the family into which he has married, but the family accepts him as its own and the cultural assimilation is thus effected, however peculiarly. Like Sour Sweet, The Monkey King is as funny as it is touching, and Mo’s eye for the telling detail or nuance is discerning and penetrating.

Though these first two novels are essentially domestic, each contains strong undertones of corruption and violence; Mo believes in the possibilities of human reconciliation, but he is also an unsentimental observer of the forces that divide and destroy. These come to the fore in An Insular Possession, which is set in Canton, Macao and Hong Kong during the 1830s and ’40s. Within its large cast of characters, the principal ones are two young Americans, Walter Eastman and Gideon Chase, who have come to China as representatives of traders and who soon become the passionate opponents of the new trade into which their superiors direct them: opium. “The substance and happiness of a few individuals,” they write, “are founded on the stupefaction of the intellects, the wasting of the bodies, and the misery of the unoffending families of a mass of wretched addicts,” and they determine to do something about it: to found a newspaper, The Lin Tin Bulletin and River Bee, to fight the opium trade.

Thus begins a tale that quickly assumes vast proportions. An Insular Possession is a genuine Victorian triple-decker, not merely in its length but also in its language. It is written in a deliberately archaic, prolix style that clearly is intended to evoke its period, and its extensive excerpts from The Lin Tin Bulletin and other fictional newspapers of the day—not to mention letters, journals and other documents—skillfully mimic Victorian prose. Indeed it is no exaggeration to call An Insular Possession a stylistic tour de force; not merely has Mo mastered the Victorian mood, but his knowledge of the history of China, Hong Kong and the British Empire is enormously impressive. As period piece and as history, An Insular Possession is a considerable accomplishment.

As fiction, though, it is only intermittently interesting and frequently, if the truth be told, soporific. Mo strains too hard for effect, with the result that the reader is more conscious of the strain than of the effect; the prose and the Victorian detail call attention to themselves so loudly that the characters never are able to emerge as much more than cardboard, and the story never acquires narrative strength. The texture that Mo has woven is quite lovely, but in a novel of such length and bulk, texture is not enough; a novel has to go somewhere, and An Insular Possession never really does.

This is not to say that nothing happens in it. Quite to the contrary, the book is rife with activity. There are military engagements, a duel and swashbuckling of various sorts; British generals and admirals wander in and out, along with venal tradesmen and militant Chinese and gurus of numerous descriptions; a romance is attempted and thwarted, prostitutes ply their trade, teas and dinner parties are presented; in one way after another, the “baffled, inimical cultures” of China and the West are posed against each other. All of this is done with intelligence and wit, but it barely hangs together, because Mo gives us issues and events but he does not give us people.

It is possible, to be sure, that An Insular Possession may acquire a following because of, rather than despite, precisely these shortcomings. Readers who enjoy immersing themselves in other times and cultures, and who do not object to fiction that moves at a decidedly leisurely pace, may well find the novel both agreeable and rewarding. To my taste, though, Mo’s intelligence and elegant style do not compensate for his failure to give his novel a center or for his excessive indulgence in digression and peripheral chatter. An Insular Possession probably was a great pleasure to write, but it is rather less of one to read; it demands the reader’s patience, yet it never fully earns that patience.

Still, Mo must be admired for his daring, for his refusal to be typecast as a writer of droll cross-cultural domestic stories. That he does these stories with great skill and empathy does not mean they are the only stories he should write, and his willingness to test other waters is laudable. In An Insular Possession, though, these waters prove too deep.