Nonetheless, Sally does experience the events in Nanjing directly one day when she goes on an unaccompanied walk through the city. There she witnesses gang-rape and the results of mass shootings and mutilation. This is, as it were, the author's antidote to the escapist high jinks that went on just before.
During her time in the city Sally also has a brief fling with Peter, the American photographer. For the rest of the book you aren't sure which of the two men in her life she will opt for, and the issue isn't resolved until the last page. There is even a mildly explicit sex scene on the liner heading home without the name of her partner in bed being revealed.
One interesting aspect of the novel is the author's undisguised dislike of journalists. Perhaps he has been one himself -- self-loathing is a common affliction among reporters. But the fact remains that seemingly wherever the opportunity arises, newspapers and those who work on them are ridiculed. There are many examples; news reports naturally figure frequently in a story like this. One paper runs the soothing and hypocritical headline "Imperial Army sheathes Bayonets in Harmonious Nanking."
Elsewhere the following dialogue occurs when Peter is filling out a form: "Any special skills in that box please."
"I'm a journalist."
"Just name and nationality then."
There's no doubt that Galbraith has done his homework. He is as well-versed on the movies of the day as he is on the developments in European politics, and even the English poet W. H. Auden's visit (with Christopher Isherwood) to China in the same era is quietly inserted in the tale.
Essentially this novel seeks to look beneath the surface of 1930s expatriate lives in China. Everyone knows there were beheadings and cocktail parties going on side by side, but Galbraith offers us a great deal more. His heroine, for one thing, has many of the qualities he proves he has himself: wit, skepticism, irony and a long historical perspective. Other characters are handled well, too, but none as in-depth as she is.
Whatever else it is, this is a highly intelligent novel. In some ways it may be too intelligent for its own good. It just manages to miss out, for example, on the stylishness and instantly identifiable tone of classic writers like Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh, two authors with whom Galbraith otherwise has quite a lot in common.
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