In the fictional city of Shishan north-east of Beijing, a Scottish doctor, Edward Airton, engages in learned dialogues about Christianity with the local Mandarin. "How can your religion emphasize love and turning the other cheek when you foreigners behave with such roughness and greed towards us Chinese," the latter asks. Meanwhile from up in the hills come rumors of secret societies of impoverished peasants who have been persuaded by shadowy political forces that it is the foreigner who is responsible for their nation's many ills.
In Shishan there lives also a family of down-at-heel American missionaries, plus a representative of a chemicals company anxious to expand in the area. The Germans are hard at work completing a local rail line, and a mysterious Japanese officer arrives, quietly assessing the lie of the land. Not far away the Russians are busy exploiting China's weakness in their own neck of the woods.
Into this scene arrives a young British woman engaged to marry a bluff and seemingly innocent fellow countryman she met on the boat. She soon, however, attracts the attention of an altogether more experienced expert in the sexual arts called Henry Manners. As they begin an affair, these two quickly become the novel's central characters, alongside Airton whose philosophic perspective provides a somber undertow from one end of the long narrative to the other.
This society is destined to be savaged by the Boxer uprising, though not before the missionaries' son runs away and is subsequently abducted to suffer unspeakable indignities in the "House of Heavenly Pleasure" of the book's title. There are many other sub-plots, all handled with great mastery by the author. Indeed, there are occasions when you could believe you were reading Middlemarch, George Eliot's great epic of 19th century English provincial life. But because the psychology of the characters other than Airton isn't developed in depth, the illusion doesn't generally last very long.
This is a novel, then, that depends for its success on the breadth of its scope and the variety rather than the profundity of its characters. As such it will give its readers a good deal of enjoyment. It also informs on many topics, including what went on in Chinese brothels (information derived from what the author describes as China's "extraordinary sex manuals that date back 2,000 years"). Public executions and erotic indulgence take place within yards of each other, and if this sounds sensationalist it shouldn't be taken as a measure of the book's general character. Adam Williams is a knowledgeable man who has striven hard and successfully to create a yarn that will please just about everybody. And for the wider perspective on the foreign presence in 19th century China, the reader can easily turn elsewhere.
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