”They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. ”They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. A minute passed and there was no sound. Then, with the ghastliness of the supernatural, in the same stealthy, noiseless, and horrifying manner, they saw the white china knob of the handle at the window turn also. Kitty, her nerves failing her, opened her mouth to scream; but, seeing what she was going to do, he swiftly put his hand over it and her cry was smothered in his fingers.”
When Kitty accepts the marriage proposal of Dr. Walter Fane, it sets off a chain of events that land them both in the middle of a cholera epidemic in Mei-Tan-Fu, China. Kitty is quickly leaving behind her debuttante years and is fast approaching an old maid status. It isn’t for lack of marriage proposals. She has plenty. She just enjoys being the center of attention for all men, rather than being confined to the servitude of one. When her younger sister, the much less attractive sister, lands a baronet, the pressure on her to be married becomes very real.
Dr. Walter Fane is not a fool, but he is a complete fool when it comes to his love of this beautiful bobble of girl who has never had to have a serious thought in her life. Even intelligent people can be blind in the ways of love. He knows Kitty doesn’t love him. He knows why she is desperately marrying him, and yet he must have believed that, given time, he can convince her that he is worth loving.
Kitty can not respect his love for her. Infatuation has always come easily for her. She has smoldering eyes and a lithe figure that drives men to distraction. ”What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?” That has been a question that has been asked for hundreds of years, if not thousands. What I have ascertained from the minefield of women that I’ve known is that a woman must not like herself very much to despise a man who loves her. It is sad that she considers him to be a fool to marry such a woman as she.
Kitty accepts his proposal impulsively. She despises his fawning attentions. She has therefore never invested any emotion or even thought into the relationship. He takes her to Hong Kong where he works as a bacteriologist. There she meets Charlie Townsend, who intuitively senses the vulnerability in their relationship. He is charming, fit, and knows the right string of words to whisper in a silly, unhappy girl’s ear. Kitty is a fool, and she can’t for the life of her understand why Walter can’t see it.
The resulting scandal, which starts with the turning of the white china knob on the door, turns out to be an embarrassing affair for all parties involved, as these things tend to do. Walter gives Kitty a choice, but as it turns out, she has only one choice, which is to follow him to Mei-Tan-Fu. ”It means death. Absolutely certain death.”
Whenever I pick up a W. Somerset Maugham book, I know I am in for a whirlwind ride fraught with betrayal, emotional upheaval, human frailty, selfishness, and aspects of malice. He explores the dark corners of our lives that are whispered about in alcoves at parties, and in shadowed doorways off of street corners. Those things about us that we hope no one knows, but we have a fearful inclination, spurred by our own guilt that everyone knows. The best solution to any scandal, in my opinion, is to brazen it out and wait for another scandal to come along to move your problems from the front page to the back page of the gossip mill. One must screw up occasionally so that everyone else feels better about themselves. It would be rather rude to be perfectly good all the time.
A masterpiece exploring the frivolous ways in which lives can be ruined.
”In other incarnations I have explored every inch of you, with tongue and fingers and eyes. No matter how dilapidated, scarred and mutilated your body”In other incarnations I have explored every inch of you, with tongue and fingers and eyes. No matter how dilapidated, scarred and mutilated your body, I have always found you beautiful, for it is the soul beneath I seek.”
Wang Jun, a Beijing cab driver, starts receiving letters. They are not posted to him, but left where he will be sure to find them. They are disturbing letters because they are telling him things about himself that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember these revelations because what he is being told has happened to him in the past. Not the current past, but the past before he became Wang Jun.
Enlightening? Confusing? Frightening? Crazy?
None of it will make sense or be acceptable as long as he continues to resist the notion that he has been reincarnated several times. Why does this person remember and Wang remembers nothing? Who is this letter writer?
“After incarnation is when we meet. After the hand of fate has snatched up our souls and placed them in the womb to be born again, kicking and screaming into the human world. Fate throws us in the same family, the same harem, the same herd of slaves. But fate sets us against each other. Fate has us brawling, red in tooth and claw. Fate condemns us to bring about the other’s downfall. To blaze like fiery meteors as we crash into each other’s stratosphere, then incinerate to heat and dust.”
The book takes readers backwards and forwards in time as we meet these two reincarnates time and again, as whores, eunuchs, murderers, sorceresses, slaves, concubines, and pirates. Their souls always find each other, regardless of the roles they have been assigned in any given life. Sometimes they are lovers. Sometimes they kill each other. Usually, when I read a book that flips between different time periods, I start to prefer one or the other, and that never happens in this book. The hapless Wang Jun, taxidriver, is just as interesting to me as the other colorful characters from his past lives.
I just love this description from an encounter in 1836, during the Qing Dynasty:
“Slumber beast. Yellow slit of eye. Slobbering on the cobbles of Hog Lane, as though gnashed up in the jaws of the Sea Daemon and spewed out. Hairy-knuckled hand, sleep-scratching the crotch-rot between his legs. Yellow matted hair like trampled straw. He should have been set ablaze, he was so crawling with filth and disease.”
You would think he was talking about a lion or certainly some deprived and abused creature, but of course, the Chinese boy is describing a drunk white man passed out in the gutter.
There is a concubine who has suffered under the torture of Emperor Jiajing during the Ming Dynasty in 1542. ”I loosen my sash and shrug my shoulders so my robe slides to my feet. The stitches that crisscross my body are like puckered seams, holding together my patchwork of skin. ‘Do these scars count as evidence that His Majesty favours me?’” Another great example of the dangers of anyone having absolute power. It isn’t enough for Jiajing to screw the most beautiful young girls in the land, but he also has to hurt them, scar them, make them even more his property than they already are, as depositories of his vile seed.
A thousand year bond is impossible to break. As the past continues to collide with the present, Wang becomes more and more unstable. Shadows become paranoid delusions. Friends are a fount of suspicious suppositions. Fares are annoyances who wrap barbed wire around jangled nerves with every veiled criticism. His family is unnerved by this distorted, tortured version of the person they love. If he is all these reincarnations and a product of all these events of all these past lives,…
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