Taiwan's Barbara Cartland strikes again! This was my first reaction of picking up A Conspiracy of Nations, the concluding volume of Eleanor B. Morris Wu's trilogy previously set mostly in Taiwan, but this time in Thailand, Austria and Hungary. When I reviewed the middle volume, The Black King ["Taking on Taiwan in unbridled fashion" Aug. 22, 2004, p18] I said I thought this was mere romantic fiction, but because it featured Taiwan, which few other contemporary novels did, it carried more interest than it might otherwise have done. Little has changed.
Clarissa Carleton, the heroine, came to Taiwan at the time of the Vietnam War with her husband Roger, whose plane disappeared over Cambodia. Now a widow, she has as support Arthur Pennington, her former husband's best friend, and a Roman Catholic priest, Father Jack Mulroney. Less simple are her relations with the man she subsequently married, Ahmed Wang, son of a Taiwanese mother and Japanese father. A doctor who initially thought he was gay, Ahmed had a "casual homosexual liaison with his junior colleague at the hospital, Wei-chun." Later, having seen evidence of Clarissa's affair with an American CIA agent, Nathan Lovencraft, Ahmed decides belatedly to consu-mmate his marriage with Clarissa.
The above is taken from an early plot flashback. The way this continues deserves to be quoted verbatim.
"In spite of such consummation, Clarissa -- frustrated with the gap in the heights of her Platonic love for Ahmed and the seemingly pedestrian nature of his sexual prowess -- continued her affair with Lovencraft, ostensibly to teach Ahmed lessons of love-making, and Ahmed, having found this out through the malicious offices of Clarissa's disloyal maidservant, Meimei, asked Clarissa for a divorce and left to take up a medical fellowship in Texas."
"Distressed beyond words by Ahmed's actions, Clarissa, with the assistance of Jack -- who showed her pictures of the faithless Lovencraft in flagrante delicto with the prostitutes Rita Chu and Cherry Ma that Arthur had had taped to discourage Clarissa's affair with Lovencraft -- discontinued her affair with Lovencraft.
"On the occasion of the wedding of Ahmed's beloved younger sister Precious Flower ... to Ahmed's former homosexual lover, Wei-chun, when Ahmed returned to Taiwan from Texas, Ahmed resumed his sexual relationship with Clarissa, determined to cancel his divorce and remarry her, and the pair were reunited in joy and ecstasy."
A Conspiracy of Nations duly takes matters on from there. Clarissa sets off for Hungary, via Bangkok and Vienna, to read her poetry at an International Poetry Conference. On the plane she meets two men, one of whom is an Austrian called Jorge Unterlangen. This is an example of his conversational style: "Let's all gehen upstairs und shower und change for dis efening's delights ... Ich dink virst ve vant to eat, nichts wahr? ... Ov course, meine liebchin, Thai food it vill be."
This time the international ramifications of the tale are significantly upgraded. Two American agencies, Centurion and Phalanx, vie for control of events, while a Japanese mastermind, Hiro, actually Ahmed's father, plots to sell off Taiwan to China as part of a scheme to restore the ancient power of Japan in East Asia. Ahmed's loveless marriage to a Japanese bride, Spring Branch, is part of this grand design, and his leaving her and re-marrying Clarissa therefore becomes a way of frustrating Hiro's evil plans. In addition the book features terrorist attacks, and blood is spilt on a pleasure boat on Lake Balaton.
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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