[In the following review, Winks attempts to identify Mo's purpose and achievement in An Insular Possession.]

Timothy Mo has sent his craft up a crowded river. A few years ago C. Mary Turnball, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, charted the many novels set in Hong Kong and found well over a hundred. Most, she thought, were of little account, though the public obviously thought differently of the panoramas offered by James Clavell, whose Tai-Pan, published in 1966, sprawls across much the same riverscape as Mr. Mo’s remarkable effort, An Insular Possession. Mr. Clavell was never content to let his ship slide into quiet waters, however, and in the end he was false to the history he tried to tell. Mr. Mo is more confident, his hand steady on the tiller, his sense of when to allow boredom to descend over a quiet colonial day precisely calibrated.

An Insular Possession is many things. Foremost, it is a fine book. Mr. Mo’s third novel, the result of five years’ work, fascinates much as a great, highly illustrated encyclopedia will fascinate, with odd bits of information competing with long, sustained passages of action, description and pure narrative for the reader’s attention. Mr. Mo is particularly good with water: in rivers, in the sea, from the sky, in waste and in food. “Rain distresses the rivers’s grey surface, making it seethe like an oil painting attacked by a strong reagent,” he writes, “It is quite a light rain—‘hair-fine’ rain, in the local patois … and from the shelter of the balcony seems like a rolling mist.” He enjoys language, plays with it, takes risks, sometimes fails, but page after page rolls on, a controlled flood of metaphor.

Mr. Mo ties Hong Kong to London with the image of his great river, which as it reaches the sea is “yellow-brown, the colour of tea as drunk in London.” The river is much like the British Empire, which “succours and impedes native and foreigner alike; it limits and it enables, it isolates and it joins.” The river is the highway of commerce that makes possible a triangular trade no less vicious than the one that had tied an earlier British Empire together—the trade in slaves, molasses, rum and horses that linked Africa to the West Indies and the whole to the mainland colonies of North America. This triangular trade is based on opium: slave-grown cotton is carried from the New World to England, where wage slaves turn it into cloth. The cloth is carried to India, sold to brown men who produce from the poppy a much prized drug. Though the practice is illegal, there are Chinese who will exchange silver for opium, thus to finance the tea that flows back from the East to comfort and stimulate the English factory hands, “so that drug of a kind is at work at all corners of the triangle.”

It is into this trade that two young Americans obtrude. Gideon Chase, still in his teens, hails from New England; his friend Walter Eastman hails from the South. Eastman is interested in the daguerreotype and senses how photography will change our perception of reality; Chase, who learns Chinese from a Jesuit priest, becomes an interpreter and translator for the British, so that their reality is filtered through his language. Chase and Eastman break with the American traders who are prepared to go along with the British in promoting the opium trade. They found an irreverent newspaper, The Lin Tin Bulletin and River Bee, which competes against the stern voice of the British, The Canton Monitor: “The only measures which have ever proved efficacious against the insolence of the Chinese have been those inspired by a manly and determined firmness.” From the opposing newspapers, and through opposing views of what is best for the Chinese and for the future of commerce in the region, the reader learns of the range of Western visions of the East.

But more is going on here than a panoramic exploration of Canton, Macao and Hong Kong between 1833 and 1841. Mr. Mo’s approach is, at first, maddeningly circular. His story appears to move in fits and starts, told largely in the present tense, yet interspersed with oracular observations, as from the outside. It is moved on (and at times retarded) by long passages from the competing newspapers, by letters, chunks apparently ripped from gazetteers—in short, told through all the historian’s customary primary sources, from eyewitnesses to memoirs. He is, one discovers, letting us know that the Chinese novel proceeds differently, for as an essay in Mr. Mo’s Lin Tin Bulletin tells us, a Western novel moves by virtue of its plot, “a veritable engine which advances the tale along its rails to a firm destination,” while “the native novel … moves in a path which is altogether circular,” being made up of separate episodes joined only by the loosest threads.

Mr. Mo supplies an appendix that mixes his fictional characters with the several historical figures that walk upon his stage. Through it we learn that young Gideon Hall lives to become a world-famed scholar who, in 1881, prepares a translation of The Dream of the Red Chamber, sometimes called the first Chinese novel (which, in fact, was first translated in part by an English consul in China and published in Hong Kong in 1892). Thus Mr. Mo links young Chase’s pursuit of an understanding of the Chinese language—which he must learn in order to serve as go between in a world of British plenipotentiaries and naval officers and Cantonese compradors—to the emergence of a body of scholarship about China in which two contending views of the novel, one about time and the other about distance (as Chase observes in another context), are given concrete example.

Mr. Mo also has fun with stereotypes. The first Chinese we encounter is “grinning Ah Cheong,” valet to a second-rate artist and first-rate womanizer who plays a central role in Mr. Mo’s (or Eastman’s) exploration of how painting and photography, in parallel to Western and Chinese ideas about the novel, shape different realities. Ah Cheong speaks as the condescending literature of the past required: “Mastah Eastman just now come chop-chop say you plomise give him sketch-y lesson today, you no lemember bimeby?” This bit of nonsense soon passes, and Mr. Mo returns to his rich vocabulary (the artist, we learn, has “plenilunar buttocks”), the point made.

What most appears to fascinate Timothy Mo is a central question of empire. He knows that many of the British merchants who promoted the opium trade were in all other respects kind men, generous even, Christian to a fault. He is not satirical, he is genuinely puzzled. How is it, he wonders, letting Chase speak for him, that good men do bad deeds? Or that bad men do good deeds? And how, between cultures and between generations, is one to find the language to define such deeds? How could the missionaries go up the China coast on the opium clippers, distributing Bibles with the drug?

Mr. Mo seems to conclude that we cannot know. In passages from Chase’s unpublished autobiography, he has Chase explicitly reject all iron laws, whether of Malthus or of Marx. He reflects on language (“What is a dictionary but a photograph of the river of language at a given moment?”), on how language diverges as well as divulges, isolates as well as unites. In the end, it is clear, Chase and Mr. Mo feel that historical truth is as the river, “the surface of the waters half-transparent, brittle, yet in the end opaque to our discernment while beneath that glassy roof the fish flutter, tantalisingly, half-glimpsed as an idea or memory struggling to the surface of our thought.” History is not melodrama, it simply is.