Several details suggest that these novels are a blend of fantasy and thinly-veiled autobiography. It's true many famous novels -- David Copperfield, Of Human Bondage, The Quiet American and Brideshead Revisited, to limit oneself to some English examples -- have used a similar formula. Clarissa herself, however, is an amalgam that speaks of the intensest fantasy. Almost all the men in the book want to make love with or marry her. She buries her head "with its tangled blonde tresses" on Ahmed's naked chest while at the same time walking with the aid of a stick "due to her osteoporosis and spondylosis."
And her destiny, when merely going to Hungary to read some poems, is to attract the attentions of dark forces intent on changing the power-balance in the whole of East Asia. Again, in this, the book is like all the best stories of international intrigue -- pivotal actions by individuals are decisive in the fate of nations. And Ahmed's destiny couldn't be more elevated -- "mending the international relationship of Japan and the United States, saving Taiwan and giving it a destiny it can call its own," not to mention "giving China a chance to defeat the hardliners who threaten the peace of East Asia."
Clarissa, in her willingness to wait for Ahmed until his mission is achieved, becomes a major part of this grand design. That a female is given an essentially passive role accords with the novel's fundamentally traditional assumptions, a world where people wear "loafers," frequent Taipei's Combat Zone and knock back cocktails even as they feel for each other's underwear.
I came to this book expecting another dose of quasi-comic wish-fulfillment. This was in part what I got. But at the same time I experienced a grudging admiration for the author, battling away at this fictional mammoth while at the same time holding down an academic post (she teaches at the Chinese Cultural University on Yangmingshan). There's a roguishness as well as a stubbornness about Eleanor B. Morris Wu that make these surreal fantasies of hers, despite their obvious shortcomings, entertaining at times.
Publication Notes:
A Conspiracy of Nations
By Eleanor B. Morris Wu
453 Pages
Washington House
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