7/6), has written a novel of contemporary China which attempts to give the story of one man's rise to supreme power through the vicissitudes of the republican revolution and Kuomintang China. "Certainly the novelist has no obligation to instruct anyone in anything, and certainly he has no obligation to instruct anyone in hi: tory," says Bernard De Vote in afp recent article on the contemporary historical novel. "The superior novelist tends to get out of the area of established fact into the area of unsettled or still debatable fact," This Mr. Mosley has not done, The basic limitation upon a writer of fiction not to.run contrary to recognized historic cal fact is responsible for the essential weakness of Mr. Mosley's novel. Whenever he has dramatized the effect of recent Chinese historical forces upon individual lives, he has been successful in producing a real favour of Chinese life. But to run counter to established fact by placing the Manchurian foundling Tsang in command of the victorious Kuomintang army, by making him president of the Nanking government, and then having him killed by his own people on the eve of a foreign war is contrary to fact, and hence intellectually unacceptable. This becomes glaringly obvious with the use of such figures as Sun Yat-sen, Borodin, Eugene Chen and others in relation to the fictional Tsang, who, from the fictional standpoint, is clearly intended to be Chiang Kai-shek. ere Once one admits an Intellectual inability to find satisfaction in this novel, one can see with what affection the author has written the first part of the book, laid in Manchuria. This is the most convincing writing in the book, and extends to the point when the grown Tsang leaves Manchuria for China. The bandit exploits of Tsang and his father in the Liaotung peninsula are well drawn. Once Tsang arrives in China with his £200,000, his two thousand rifles and hundred and fifty men, his rise to complete power through the initial introduction of &Horodin is cketchily end rapidly given. The reviewer ohiects to the author's point of view frequently expressed—the upright, fearless quality of the Manchus, a sanguine hardy people, in contrast to the weak, effete end decadent Chinese. Theme is a curious sense of values shown in the repeated express sion of the author's conviction that all Europeans in China were "indescribably cheap and nasty." He shows this in such remarks as this, "Tsang was faithful to no woman, and he Killed and robbed without eempunetion; and yet, somehow he was a better man than el! of these (the Europeans)" As a story of pure adventure this novel falls to carry conviction. In complicating the novel with too many historical person ages and events Mr. Mosley has failed to write either satisfactory history or convincing fiction.—FapR.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.