This book caught my eye in a remainder bookstore catalogue, mainly because it was set in Harbin, Manchuria, where my mother spent her childhood and college years. The action, however, takes place in 1910, a decade before her time and prior to the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War.

Based on a real epidemic event, this is an eerily prescient novel, having been published in 2018 just a year before the explosion of Covid-19.

The Baron is a doctor and chief medical examiner for the city of Harbin (spelt Kharbin in the novel) who is alerted to random dead bodies seen in the winter snows, only for them to abruptly vanish before he can discover how they died.

The Baron then embarks on often-delicate dealings with the city’s Russian administrator appointed by the Tsar, General Khorvat, and others in the medical field. As the only doctor who is fluent in Chinese, he plays a valuable role in straddling the deep divisions between the occupying Russians and the Chinese government. He is also married to a young Chinese woman, Li Ju, whom he rescued from a Scots-run orphanage. This puts him at odds with the Russian community who look down on such intimate relationships with the Chinese. His most reliable friend is another doctor, Messonier, who has fallen in love with the only female doctor on the team, Maria Lebedev.

As the snows deepen during a bitter winter in this city at the crossroads of Asia, the dark atmosphere intensifies with every page. There is increasing panic and terror at the seemingly hundred percent death rate with mounting piles of corpses and coffins, and inhumane or failed attempts in quarantine. There is anger in diplomatic wrangling as authorities squabble, complicated by cultural clashes between Chinese superstition and Orthodox religion.

There are graphic scenes of the symptoms of this particular type of plague that may have originated in wild animal furs, involving copious quantities of blood that may be too much for many readers. The friction between the medical experts as to vaccines and treatment also reflects what has been all too common in our recent times. The wearing of masks, gloves, and dowsing oneself in copious quantities of disinfectant permeate every page.

Yet interspersed with all the horror, there is faith and humanity and gentle lyrical passages of prose about Chinese calligraphy – the Baron’s hobby that he is studying with scholar Xiansheng – and finely detailed tea ceremonies overseen by Chang, the dwarf doorman from Churin’s department store.

This is a complex book that is not for the faint-hearted, yet it is also soulful and utterly compelling, especially as it reflects the current world pandemic which ironically also started in China and has produced so much fear and misinformation, yet given witness to incredible dedication and sacrifice by those in the front line of combating disease.

​Five stars

(Here is a link to an article on this little-known plague.)

 


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hachette.com.au (paperback version)

​A novel featuring a fictional movie star normally would not be high on my reading list, so I must congratulate the marketing gang from Simon & Schuster on a good job as they got me with their spin - the glamorous cover and memorable title - so I thought maybe a bit of Hollywood glitz might make a change. 

There are two female narrators – Monique and Evelyn.

Monique is in her mid-thirties and about to be divorced. She’s a rising ambitious Afro-American journalist for a magazine. When she is specifically asked for by the world’s biggest movie star, Evelyn Hugo, to write her spill-all biography, both Monique and her editor are astonished.

We soon discover that in spite of having seven husbands, none of them were Evelyn’s true love. It doesn’t take long to discover who that true love is and eventually we get to the reason why Evelyn only wanted Monique to write the biography, although a sharp-eyed reader might glean clues from her background.

It will depend on how well you know past Hollywood royalty as to who might be the inspiration for Evelyn Hugo and others. Although all of them are fictional, one can immediately spot snatches of much-married super stars like Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe, or others with fluid sexuality such as Jodi Foster, Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. Other stars disguised their cultural backgrounds, bringing to mind women like Merle Oberon and Rita Hayworth. There are even echoes of Anita Ekberg and Ingrid Bergman who revitalised sinking Hollywood careers in Europe. Monogamy is not a thing with any of the husbands who include at least one wife-beater and self-serving opportunists of varying degree. Other male characters have hints of Rock Hudson or Tab Hunter.

The narrative is tiresome and endlessly trite, all the characters are unlikeable, shallow and have few redeeming features. I disliked Evelyn intensely: she was amoral, self-aggrandising and Oscar-ambitious at the expense of everything else. She doesn’t have any contemplative or spiritual qualities that might have softened her.

Being another movie star, her true love wasn’t much better, so their tempestuous relationship left me bored and cold. When the true love gets annoyed over an explicit scene Evelyn does in a movie, the affair may be over. This stretches credulity. We are talking about actors here! All of them test boundaries or do raunchy love scenes on screen, it comes with the job.

What disappoints me most about the book is the lack of anything much other than ambition over Oscars, marriages on a whim, domestic violence, unrepentant abortion and incessant relationships chatter. We have next to nothing of the dynamism of the movie business itself. There is little about the craft of acting, or the savage wheeling and dealing or the complex preparation that goes into making and distributing a film or making sure it is a success – all aspects that could have added so much more.

I don’t know how I managed to get to the end, but sometimes you have that horror-fascination with something (usually a bad movie or tacky reality TV show) and you press on just to see how much worse things can get and whether there is anything that redeems your faith by the end. Even when I reached the last page, I remained unmoved although I’m sure other readers collapsed into tears.

Currently, there are over a million ratings for this on Goodreads, and the average score is 4.48 out of 5 stars. I am therefore seriously out of touch with what readers love. For me personally, this has been an interesting exercise in how easily one can get sucked in by good publisher marketing. Perhaps the inevitable Netflix series will be better. At least there might be some nice frocks to look at.
 
Two stars (mostly for the cover and numerous mentions of fabulous designer dresses in emerald green).


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​booktopia