This is in many ways a neat and intelligent novel. It tells the story of a young man in modern Shanghai, Shen Fuling, who has just returned from study in the US where he majored in fine arts. He's joined a newly-established auction house and his employers, two ambitious Americans, hope to dominate the growing market in this area with Shen as their evaluator, authenticating the art objects that come their way.
In the opening chapter, Shen receives a rare copy of the Chinese classic, Six Chapters of a Floating Life, written in the early 19th century by Shen Fu, a disappointed civil servant. He begins to read it, and at once has the feeling that he is re-living the life of the author, whose name, of course, he almost shares.
Six Chapters of a Floating Life tells the story of the love between the writer and a young girl. Soon after finding the book, Shen Fuling falls in love with a young American painter, Ruth, who has come to live in Shanghai and so also inhabits a corner of its art world.
The problem for the modern Shen is that the classic book is unfinished. Despite its title, it only has four chapters. If he could find the missing pages, he thinks, he would know what fate has in store for him, and also how best to treat what he quickly realizes is Ruth's deteriorating physical condition.
The Red Thread is thus not only about Six Chapters of a Floating Life -- it also mirrors it. This is a very artificial kind of plot for a novel, consciously contrived and, as it transpires, also meticulously worked out. This is pleasing enough on one level, giving the book the formality of one of the glazed bowls its protagonist offers up for auction. But it works against it being a rollicking good read.
At one point in the story, Shen has to decide whether or not to stick by his evaluation of some paintings that have been offered the company for sale. The chances are they are the property of the local Deputy Mayor and so the issue is politically sensitive. Shen becomes convinced they're forgeries, but his bosses want him to reverse this opinion so as not to anger a man who could pull the plug on their fast-growing business.
This is a major confrontation, a clash of principles that are close to the heart of the book and leads to Shen deciding to be true to his artistic integrity and resign from his job. Yet the scene occupies only a couple of pages. Surely, you feel, it could have been developed in some more gripping way. But it's not. It's as if the author is reluctant to plunge too deep into his characters' feelings and motives.
There is a methodical accumulation of detail about China in the book. Nicholas Jose, who was at one time Australian cultural attache in Beijing, knows China well, and he gives us the benefit of his erudition.
And of course it is actually Jose himself who is the connoisseur. As narrator, he is interested in the play of light on a canal or the shrill ring of a mobile phone at the expense of anything ruminative, anything that might disturb the story's precision and poise. The characters are certainly individuals, distinctly realized and genuinely like people from everyday life. Yet there remains something unexpressed about the novel. It's cultured, but it's also abstemious, lacking in careless rapture and a sense of the broad canvas.
The classic original, for instance, features a singing girl who Jose vividly transposes into what might easily be her modern equivalent, a charismatic nightclub entertainer. Both Shen and Ruth become emotionally involved with her, but the author holds back from developing this potentially explosive triangle. There's no doubt it is intended as an erotic menage a trois but we are denied the full emotional implications.
Modern Shanghai is well described. The clientele who patronize Shen's auction house are portrayed as a new class of moneyed collectors, dressed in a combination of international chic and traditional Chinese elegance. Some, it is true, come buying from Taiwan and Hong Kong, but most are from Shanghai.
Indeed, this modern China is so unrelievedly attractive it comes as something of a surprise. Is China really as congenial as this? Or does the author have a reason for showing it through such rose-tinted spectacles and making it so photogenic? It will already be clear where this argument is leading. Yes, this novel does read in many places like an embryonic film-script.
There is no doubt that contemporary China is more than ready to be the location for some lavish Hollywood movie. It has settled down and prospered sufficiently for foreign film studios to consider locating major movies there. A love story, featuring picturesque lakeside temples, riverboats, but also modern Shanghai could prove an attractive commercial proposition.
The title, incidentally, refers to the image in Chinese culture of a red thread drawn between the fingers of the Old Man under the Moon, symbolizing the passionate attachment between lovers.
Taiwan gets characterized unattractively in the middle of the book, when a vulgar Taipei businessman turns up in China to secure a cut-price second wife. Nevertheless, the island's credit is to some extent restored in the novel's closing pages.
Interestingly, the artist Zhang Daqian, who ended his life in Taiwan and who was featured by the National Palace Museum in a joint exhibition with Picasso in 1998, is described here as "the prolific old artist, ex-forger, word-traveler, sham." Evidence for this harsh judgment is not given.
This is a well-planned, well-executed work, clearly organized and the scheme then effectively carried out. But there is little sense of something that simply must be said, of the Chinese knowledge put to the service of some big idea. The Red Thread is a skillful, sophisticated entertainment rather than a compulsive read.
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