cover image The House of Memory

The House of Memory

Nicholas R. Clifford, T. Rowland Harrison. Ballantine Books, $22 (343pp) ISBN 978-0-345-38149-1

While it doesn't take a historian to point out the similarities between two bloody uprisings in China five decades apart, it certainly helps when events are depicted with the knowledge that historian Clifford ( Spoilt Children of Empire ) brings to his first novel. This is a sophisticated analysis of 20th-century Chinese history with expert insight into the Chinese character and perceptive comments about historical theory. Two eras are evoked simultaneously here. Matthew Walker comes to Shanghai in May 1989 to research a book for his graduate degree. At the same time he will try to discover for Laura Donati, the woman he loves, why her great-uncle, journalist Simon Larsen, disappeared from the city in 1929, just as Chiang Kai-shek was about to seize control, betraying the Communists who had been his allies against the warlords. Though he is well versed in the intrigue that dominated Chinese politics of the 1920s--the Communists, the Nationalists and the notorious opium-running Green Gang were all vying to wrest control from the foreigners who dominated Shanghai's government--Clifford doesn't achieve the dramatic momentum that would make it compelling fiction. Matthew discovers surprising secrets both about Simon's involvement with the revolutionaries, and about a love affair that helps illuminate Matthew's own problems in winning Laura's commitment. This latter device seems strained, the parallels between the two sets of lovers too pat; so too are the similar crises of conscience that confront both Simon and Matthew. In fact, at times the story seems more devised and earnest than impassioned. Yet the authenticity of detail with which Clifford conjures the city of Shanghai and the Chinese social and political landscape make this novel well worth reading. (June)