Book Review : Gen. Fu, Gen. Yu and General Confusion

Jade and Fire by Raymond Barnett (Random House: $19.99; 381 pages)

I know exactly where my patience stopped in this story of the Communist takeover of Peking (December, 1948-January, 1949). My patience stopped on Page 114 when Gen. Fu was having one of many conversations with Gen. Yu.

Gen. Fu begins: “ ‘I don’t know what to say to all that, Gen. Yu. I am a plain soldier. I have a city to defend. I’ll defend it.’ ”

Yu answers: “ ‘That is spoken like the heroes of old, Gen. Fu. . . .’ ”

But rather than responding, “Fu glanced at the door. Zhou, taking his cue through the peephole, opened it and announced that Fu’s next appointment was waiting.”

Gen. Fu, naturally, remarks, “ ‘Gen. Yu, you will excuse me. . . .’ ”

Gen. Yu says, “ ‘Of course I have enjoyed our conference immensely,” but Yu can’t leave without a final “ ‘Goodby, General.’ ”

The Characters

About this time the reader may begin to yank on his or her hair and begin to shriek, who gives a picnic melon ball about Gen. Fu or Gen. Yu if (1) they can’t say anything to each other to further the plot, if (2) they keep turning up in the same scene so that your brain starts clicking like a badly handled abacus trying to keep up with the two of them, and (3) especially since taken alone or together we really don’t care if Gen. Fu Tsoye, a warlord, ruler of Peking, taken from the pages of “History,” or Gen. Yu Chenling, a right-wing zealot made up by the author and therefore a person who could have been given a different name entirely, lives or dies?!

And I won’t even bring up the problems with Chan, who is an aide to Gen. Yu, and a total maniac, or Chang, who is a friend of Inspector Bei, the hero, and a teacher at Yenching University of Peking, who sits in on historical negotiations. The larger fact is that this is an extremely goofy book told in the most solemn manner, and the more solemn the author becomes, the sillier the story gets.

It must have seemed a good idea at the outset, an historical novel in the traditional sense, one in which an intense personal drama is acted out against an almost equally intense historical panorama.

“History” again--that moment when, four years after the end of World War II, Peking stood as a Nationalist island in a Communist Chinese sea; when the whole country teetered on the edge of the new communist era, when the values of one of the oldest civilizations on Earth would be tested by fire: What would survive, as the communists prepared to march on the ancient northern capital? Let me say that this half, so to speak, this “yang” to the more personal “yin” of the narrative, is conscientiously taken care of. Barnett knows his material. Ironically, he may know it too well.

It’s the “novel” part of this historical novel that suffers. Inspector Bei, chief of police of Peking, is unhappily married. You know that right away because his wife doesn’t look up from her magazine when he comes home for lunch. But she leaves soon for the comparatively peaceful south, and Bei is left with two murders to solve: (1) a Taoist monk has been burned by his followers because of alleged fornication, and (2) a mad rapist killer who frequents high-class brothels, asks for girls with a Shansi accent and then slits their throats, is loose in Peking.

Gen. Fu the warlord is very interested in both of these crimes and keeps on Bei’s case about both investigations. And if you think that “keeps on Bei’s case” was a diction error, try reading this book!

Characters “overreact” to things, they come home at night feeling “bushed,” they opine that they’re “feeling super,” and they fear that they might have been “brainwashed.” Then, in the next page or two, they commence love scenes in which “Overlapping Fish Scales” and “Cinnabar Clefts” take, so to say, center stage.

Mysterious Mistress

Anyway. Gen. Fu has a mysterious mistress, the beautiful Mei Lu, who is very good at Overlapping Fish Scales, but a positive bore as she drones on for paragraphs about the wisdom of the Tao to her warlord lover. And Inspector Bei, as he moseys about Peking, turns up the beautiful Mei Ling, ex-mistress of the burned monk, who also speaks volumes on the subject of the Tao, the very essence of life. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Mei Ling is Mei Lu’s twin sister . . . and a lot more fun than Mrs. Bei.

You come from this novel with the sense that the Taoists probably supported Mao Tse-tung, and with more knowledge about Peking in 1949 than you had going in. But as the plot is supposed to thicken, it just doesn’t.

Silly sex scenes can be tolerated, even enjoyed, in a novel like this. But silly killings are another matter, and Gen. Fu and Gen. Yu blathering small talk, and women who aren’t believable in any language make “Jade and Fire” a sort of high-brow routine of “Yu’s on First?”