Move on, Man!. Review on Noble House - James Clavell

1400 pages long with suspense, thrillers and disappointments.

The author begins well and you have all the promise of this novel being a mixture of genres – crime, business, spies, love, sex – the works. This would be a culturist’s delight – delving deep into the history of Hong Kong, the mixed culture there of the Chinese, the British, the Eurasians and the Americans. It talks of the way each does business, the way each deals with life and the faith in joss – what I assume is fate and karma.

And, that is where, I think, this fails. The joss takes on too much of an upper-hand. All inconvenient situations are suitably diluted by unexpected turn of events including an earthquake.

Is that the problem with the novel? Or that there are too many characters and situations that seem to make the book heavy. What has Clavell tried to write about? The fate of the leading business house – the Noble House – and its tai-pan Dunross? The company is tottering on the brink of a downfall and is held only by the influence the tai-pan has on his bankers to extend his loan. A promising tie-up with an American company Par-Con is expected to turn the fate of the Noble House.

But the American company is on a trip of its own and Bartlett, the head of Par-Con, is not above playing tricks to gain his foothold.

And, he does this with the help of people ready to bring the tai-pan down – John Chen, Taipan’s compradore’s son, and Gornt, taipan’s chief rival.

Sticking to this track alone would have given Clavell a lot of scope for suspense and drama. But, no. His ambition to weave in social studies I feel has let the book go astray. And, he brings in a Russian spy network that just dissipates in the earthquake without anybody being able to pin the culprits – the chief among them, a triple agent, escaping at a hair’s breadth.

Then the love triangle that Bartlett finds himself in and the way it ends is nothing short of our Indian movies.

All these make for interesting reading, but the way it ends makes you feel Clavell should have just stuck to one thing and not brought in too many accidents to sustain his novel.