cover image Opal Eye Devil

Opal Eye Devil

John Hamilton Lewis. Durban House Publishing, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-930754-01-0

Lurking somewhere in this amateurish adventure novel is a disjointed swashbuckler about late-19th-century Shanghai and a British seaman who overcomes adversity to become China's powerbroker. On board a ship bound for Shanghai in 1877, Tong-Po, an English-educated Chinese dwarf, is beaten for sport by shipping baron Alex Bartrum. When young seaman Eric Gradek attempts to rescue the unfortunate man, he is stabbed and left to die in the filthy bilge of the ship's hold. Smuggled off the ship in a footlocker by a grateful Tong-Po, plucky Gradek is placed under the protection of the dwarf's mentor, the powerful warlord Jing-Jiang, who affords Gradek a classic education in Chinese, then sends him to the English University in Singapore. Over the next 13 years, Gradek bests Bartrum for the hand of the lovely daughter of the territorial governor and becomes successful enough to threaten the survival of Bartrum's Far Eastern trading empire. When Bartrum sets fire to Gradek's kerosene warehouse to avert his own ruin in 1900, Gradek acts heroically to save Shanghai from a holocaust. The hero's struggle to even the score with archvillain Bartrum is set against a backdrop of early petroleum and silk commerce, the opium wars and a grand scheme to corner the world market in oil. Lewis's simplistic view of the Boxer Rebellion and other Chinese history is further undermined by manifest literary shortcomings and artistic na vet . (Nov.)