Ding-dong the witch is dead!. 6 months and 1400 pages later, I have finally finished this massive door stopper of a novel, and the best I can say about it is that its better than Gai-jin, the massive tome about Struan's in 1870s Japan which also took me most of a year to get through. I've been reading a book of Clavell's Asian Saga per year since college, a privileged position on my reading list accorded to him because I so enjoyed Shogun, Tai-pan and King Rat.The plot of this novel moves at a snail's pace for 1100 pages, and only picks up after that, at which point you've been reading for months and still have an equivalent of a reasonably sized novel to go. The plot meanders through about 20 sub-plots only half of which get resolved to any satisfaction, and some of which get resolved by deus ex machina in a highly unsatisfactory way. As always, the magic of Clavell is in bringing a time and place to life, as he brought to life 1500s Japan and 1840s Hong Kong. He does that here as well, but the problem is that 1960s Hong Kong is too familiar to be interesting.I will say there are interesting bits. The politics are fascinating, with the main character arguing emphatically that the US and Britain should help out the PRC on the grounds that they are thorns in the sides of the USSR which is the real threat. This to the point of selling materials to China to create nuclear weapons and helping the Thread of the Silkworm guy to defect in order to secure the Bank of China's aid during a monetary crisis. The gender politics are a fascinating mix of Randian ideas of self-sufficiency and a kind of parochial British love of the nuclear family. The action is also fascinating, since all of it takes place in scenes of tense negotiation in board rooms and pool halls and race tracks, rather than in any kind of violence.And I will say that I enjoyed the last 300 pages or so when the pace picked up and stuff started being tied together. But none of that makes up for a plot that is too long and convoluted, and which takes 1000 pages to get moving.
This epic saga of a great British mercantile house in Hong Kong in the early 1960s is a 1400 page tome whose plot takes place in the space of one week. The action in the novel is intense. In Noble House, you get the feel of a staunchly capitalistic Hong Kong, a place that makes the setting of "The Jungle" look like a worker's paradise! Clavell's hero, like most of Clavell's heroes, is an alpha male and the absolute monarch of the family business which controls much of Hong Kong's commerce and power. The problem that I had with Noble House was the tendency of Clavell to minimize his Chinese characters, to glorify the ruthless, and to treat women as tools of the alpha male. This is a common characteristic of Clavell novels, it just happens to be more pronounced in "Noble House". The novel also had, dare I say it, too much action in it. Within this one week period we read about espionage activities of the Soviets and the Communist Chinese, the machinations of Hong Kong, British and American corporations, horrible catastrophes such as bank failures, floods, earthquakes and riots, and plots involving organized crime. That's a pretty heavy week, even for Hong Kong tycoon family. It strains credibility, but then again this is a novel and not a history. Novels are meant to be compelling, and one must admit that Clavell knows how to hold the reader's attention.If you are interested in the commercial empires of Hong Kong and the Far East, and you are willing to invest the weeks or more that it will take for you to get through this monster, the I would recommend "Noble House." However, let the casual reader beware - this is not for the less than dedicated!
What do You think about Noble House (1986)?
This book is obviously a monster. However, there was not a single point throughout the book where I felt exhausted or bored. I was not yearning for it to end. Instead, I enjoyed every new twist and turn and reveal of character and secret. It remained compelling throughout. Why not 5 stars?? The ending irritated me. Not only did things seem unresolved and unsettled, but I thought the author relied on a huge catastrophe as a way to segway to the end.Either way, I highly recommend this book. It rivals Shogun as his best work.
—Renee Hessling
This book is to business thrillers what High Karate cologne is to smell. An overpoweringly profoundly silly paen to the art of high baroque unabashed story telling praticed by Clavell/Michner. Words are splattered across pages, and the pages churned out with merry abandon. Apparently modeled on Jardines it covers a week in Hong Kong business if everybody was a) very very drunk b)thirteen year old boys c)on a potent cocktail of drugs.So essentially the book bears no relation to any kind of reality and nor need ti I suppose, it does work as a kind of revealing social history of a very different time as an escapist fantasy (again for drunk thriteen year old boys on a potent cockatil of drugs). It doesnt really work as a thriller but if you thought Dynasty was too gritty and sober this does the trick.At the end of the book I had been bludgeoned into the same sated submission that oozed over a guitly kernel of enjoyment horror at the full on let it rip cheesetastic splendor.
—James
Its rare for a book of this size to maintain its pace, but this one manages it. A great business novel with a large cast of larger than life characters from governors to coolies in the cauldron that is Hong Kong. The plot twists and turns with many unexpected turns and stories within stories. The characters themselves are far removed from anyone I have ever met and operate in a alien moral framework that is utterly alien. Yet one can't help but sympathize with them as every one of them goes about achieving their own aims with ruthless rationality.At a deeper level this book also represents Clavell's political philosophy. Hong Kong is depicted as a Capitalist experiment in the backyard of the expanding Communism of the 1960s. Capitalists of different shades from the responsible to the robber baron variety are shown in the background of a culture where greed is seen as almost a virtue. The depiction of the Soviets is to a certain extent stereotypical. This was written in the 80s when nobody expected how rapidly USSR could collapse. The Chinese are shown to be utterly enigmatic yet totally rational.
—Kunal Lal
