Books I have been reading: Qiu Xiaolong - Don't Cry Tai Lake

I first came across Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen novels some years ago when the first six were published in the UK very soon after they had come out in the US. I read The Loyal Character Dancer and liked it for several reasons. The basic plot was good though at various times there was a definite collapse of logical development and it seemed to give a very good idea of what it was like to live and work in Shanghai in the late eighties or early nineties still oppressed with memories of such horrible events as the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent enforced exodus of young people to the villages.

Chen, the son of an intellectual, too young to have been affected directly by those events, a poet who had been directed into the police force after graduation and who then to his own surprise found that he was quite good at it, was an interesting character. After that I read the first of the series, Death of a Red Heroine, which was excellent with a shocking but entirely credible ending. To this day I think that is by far the best book of the series, with A Case of Two Cities close second.

Qiu Xiaolong left China in 1988 to take up a fellowship in St Louis, Missouri, where he was working on T. S. Eliot as well as writing his own poetry. Then came the events of Tiananmen Square [surely, no link required] and he, with his family, decided to stay in the US, where he has continued to write in English and Chinese. So the detective novels were written from outside the country, based on memory, knowledge of history and, one must assume, information from people who are still there. Only one of his novels has been translated into Chinese and it was severely bowdlerized with all references to Shanghai removed. Not surprisingly, it was not a success. The books are available in Beijing in English but only in the English language bookshop and one cannot help wondering who shops there. (I know this from someone who did go there and did buy one of the novels.)

The series continued but, in my opinion, began to lose steam, possibly because of the distance from the place about which the author was writing. The links with the Maoist past remained fascinating but the plots became far too convoluted and Chen's own character far too neurotic. He kept having nervous break-downs, not eating (though he is supposed to be a great expert on food and a gourmet), and generally being unable to decide what he wanted to do with himself.

In The Mao Case, a very promising plot collapses right at the end because of Chen's completely incredible actions. After that, no Chen book seemed to appear in the UK and I assumed that Qiu Xiaolong had decided that the series had come to a full stop and turned his attention to other writings.

How wrong one can be. Three more books were published not very long after The Mao Case but none of them came out in the UK until last year so it seemed as if there had been a longish gap. I have now read the first of that trio, Don't Cry Tai Lake, which also takes place in a real place on the shore of the eponymous lake and appears to deal with the horrific pollution problems there.

This book and, I assume, the two that follow it deal with present day China (well, late nineties so not quite present day) without any direct references to the Maoist past. Does Qiu Xiaolong intend to write six of these? An intriguing idea.

Chief Inspector Chen who, I am glad to say, is back to being a gourmet and addicted to good food, is now legendary in police circles and definitely a promising young cadre who is being pushed forward by an important Party boss in Beijing. Other party officials do not like him and hope to prevent his rise through the nomenclatura. This has been the situation more or less for several books and one cannot help thinking that it is time we moved on and saw him moving upward or definitively being pushed out of that track.

Here he is told to take up a holiday in a remarkably luxurious High Cadre Centre on the lake and, as a side issue, think of producing a report about local conditions, which would be very useful to his career. A little bemused he does as he is told and starts working on his report as well as on some poetry. Then he meets and falls in love with a young environmental activist and decides to use her information as part of the report, because he thinks that the truth of what is happening in and around the heavily polluted and infected lake should be known.

Discussions wobble. Someone points out that at least now people have enough to eat and are getting richer but, as Chen replies, at some cost to the environment (and themselves with many diseases and inedible food). There are many references to the new China where people just want to get rich without caring about anything or anyone around them but it is quite clear that the pollution goes back many decades. As ever, it started under the Communist system and it is the continuance of that system in one form or another that has allowed the situation to deteriorate so much.

Then the director of one of the most polluting factories that is about to become private is murdered and the Internal Security uses the event to arrest a young man who is an even better known environmental activist and have their eye on Shanshan, the girl Chen is in love with. Naturally, he becomes involved in the investigation with the sub rosa help of the local police sergeant who is thrilled to be working with the great Chief Inspector Chen.

In fact, that murder and detective plot is very good and follows a classic Golden Age pattern. Unfortunately, it turns out to have nothing to do with the pollution motif, so the chapters devoted to ranting about that become superfluous. The poetry Chen writes is rather good but his habit of endlessly quoting his own and others' lines and sayings becomes tedious. He solves the case but his own future remains undecided. Once again he loses the girl and his apparent status as a young promising cadre stays stationary. I cannot help hoping that somewhere in the novels after Don't Cry Tai Lake there is some resolution to at least one of Chief Inspector Chen's personal dilemmas.

Books I have been reading: Luke Harding - A Very Expensive Poison

Probably I ought to be writing about the extraordinary fracas created by the Times and its hackette, Rachel Sylvester, around the Conservative Party leadership race and I shall do so tomorrow, by which time perhaps the newspaper will produce the full tapes of the interview with Andrea Leadsom, settling to some extent the row. As things stand the newspaper cannot be seen to have behaved honestly or honourably but that does not surprise those of us who have viewed the Times for some time as nothing better than a rag with delusions of grandeur.

Until then, let us turn to other, equally important matters. I have already written about the launch of Luke Harding's book about the Litvinenko affair, A Very Expensive Poison but since then I have also read the book and it is, in my opinion, of great importance and interest. It describes the crime in detail, the various events surrounding it, in Britain, Russia and Ukraine and also the Inquiry and Sir Robert Owen's astonishing report. The book is undoubtedly a page-turner. How could it be otherwise, given its subject, but not everyone could have done as much justice to it as Luke Harding.

At times the language gets a little too journalistic and too Guardian-like. For instance one cannot help wondering what Mr Harding's experience of judges might have been if he thinks that a retired one like Sir Robert Owen being fair and open-minded as well as dryly witty somehow makes him "cool". Actually, it makes him normal as judges go. At other times I thought that the author (who is, in fact, a good friend) had spent a little too much time with Russians and in the process lost a good many definite and indefinite articles. But these are really minor cavils and make one smile while reading a story that is sad, depressing but also, at times, uproariously funny. The account of those two hapless assassins, Andrei Lugovoi, now important politician and recipient of a state honour for services to the fatherland, second class (would he have received first class if he had not been quite so inept?) and Dmitry Kovtun, of whose subsequent career far less is known, wandering round London, trying to find an opportunity to feed Polonium 210 to their victim, failing, flushing it down the toilet and then coming back to try again is richly and blackly comic. As Luke Harding says, Russia does produce the best news stories.

There are many things the reader can find out: Alexander Litvinenko's attempts to introduce some kind of honesty into the FSB, President Putin's enmity towards him precisely because of that, his relationship with Boris Berezovsky (also dead in mysterious circumstances); Putin's probably links (well, almost certain) to criminal gangs, the FSB's absolutely certain links to those gangs; the careers (if one can call it that) of the two assassins and, most interestingly, the various meeting places for agents, both British and Russian. There are hilariously funny descriptions of Lugovoy's and Kovtun's various visits to London and their hopeless attempts to pass as ordinary businessmen (a police constable at Heathrow picked them out on sight as suspicious individuals) and their equally hilarious attempts to find some entertainment. There is a wonderful description of a particular dodgy nightclub in St James's, called Hey Jo's, visited by the two Russians during one of their unsuccessful trips to London. Low levels of radiation were found in various places but not on the floor or the large phallus at the entrance.

Hey Jo's was linked to a restaurant called Abracadabra, which served Russian food in the most outrageously and hideously glitzy surroundings. Neither place exists any longer since the owner, former Essex fruit and veg stall owner, Dave West, was knifed by his son some time last year. The son is serving a sentence of 16 years for manslaughter.

The book places the grim tale in an international background. There are excellent, pithy accounts of the growth of the Russian mafia state, the invasion of Ukraine, the shooting down of MH17 and of the murder of Boris Nemtsov. In fact, everything you ever wanted to know about Putin's Russia but were too frightened to ask is here.

All of that is fascinating but the best part remains the account, suitably tense as if this were a thriller, of Sir Robert Owen's inquiry, the evidence that came out during it and, finally, the report, which firmly accused Lugovoi and Kovtun and equally firmly pointed an accusing finger at President Putin, a man described by people as a gangster masquerading as a statesman.

So far so good. But what is the British government going to do about it, given that we have never managed to produce a Magnitsky List? Well, not a lot. Home Secretary and Prime Ministerial hopeful Theresa May, who had stood firm against any kind of inquiry until the shooting down of MH17, something that even she could not ignore, has also made it clear that nothing much was going to be done. We were not even going to issue a Litvinenko List as that might upset some highly placed Russians, specifically the President. One cannot see her changing her mind if she becomes Prime Minister.

So, knowing that a British citizen was murdered on British soil by foreign agents on the orders of a foreign leader, we can rest assured that .... we shall keep quiet about that and about other suspicious deaths. Not quite, of course. Marina Litvinenko has not kept quiet and has finally achieved that inquiry and the report she wanted to read; Scotland Yard may have kept quiet but behind that quietness worked hard to collect evidence and witnesses; Sir Robert Owen did not keep quiet but produced a bombshell of a report that was carefully argued on the basis of evidence; above all, Luke Harding has not kept quiet and for that we must be very grateful. This book should be read by anyone who attempts to make statements about Russia.

Books I have been reading: Joshua Rubenstein - The Last Days of Stalin

One cannot live by Brexit alone. There will be postings on other subjects. I have decided to start a new thread - books I have been reading (and not just detective stories). To start with, a fascinating new volume by Joshua Rubenstein about the last year of Stalin's life, his death and the months immediately after. So you can all wait for part 3 of my rant, my piece about the latest House of Lords reports and my views on David Cameron's extraordinary pronouncements (though I cannot help wondering whether he is secretly a Brexiteer).

Recent years have seen various biographies of Stalin and some books that concentrate on the last period of his life. This is justified: Stalin's rule and the legacy he left have been crucial to modern history. Also, certain new documents have become available but, more importantly, new analysis and thinking have to produce new books.

Professor Rubenstein starts his book with a detailed description of the tyrant's very last days, from his massive stroke on March 1 to his actual death on the 5th. The story is well known in general but it is good to have it retold in detail, based on various accounts. And a very bizarre story it is, too. Stalin, possibly the most powerful man in the world, so feared assassination that he created rings of security around himself wherever he went and even in one dacha he changed his bedrooms in order that nobody should know where he was sleeping. What it actually created is a situation in which he was safely protected from any help he might have had after his stroke.

Members of his personal guard did not dare to enter his bedroom though they suspected that something must be wrong till the evening of the day after, that is probably about twelve hours after the stroke. When they finally managed to send in a servant who found "Uncle Joe" on the floor, unable to move or to speak or even to control his bladder, they went through a number of stages before a doctor could be called. By that time the various Politburo members who were mostly terrified that Stalin was about to start another major purge had arrived and began their jockeying for position. And so on, and so on.

The book leaves the non-grieving colleagues, the permanently drunk son and the genuinely grief-stricken daughter to wait for the old man's death and moves back to take in the last few years of the great dictator's life, his worsening health, his growing paranoia, the new purge that focused to a great degree on Jews and the threat to his immediate colleagues with whom he played a cat and mouse game. Nobody knew for certain who was in favour and who was out of it. It is no wonder that for many years a story was going round that they actually finished him off when they found him incapacitated. A nice story like the various ones about Beria's end but the evidence is non-existent and Professor Rubenstein will have no truck with it.

There is at least one new aspect: at the time and in the decades since then an assumption has reigned that Stalin was meditating on a plan to exile all the remaining Jews who did not end up in the Gulag or the execution chamber to some part of Siberia with one or two suggestions as to where that might be. Professor Rubenstein has not been able to find any direct evidence that such a plan existed though people spoke of it unofficially and even, occasionally, called for such an act. Had it been Stalin's intention or was he merely encouraging rumours to create even more terror in people's minds? Impossible to tell.

Finishing Stalin off, so to speak, the author moves to the post-Stalin era, analyzing the immediate developments inside the country and in the world, the possible missed opportunities though these were somewhat chimerical. Inside the country and the Soviet colonies there were several developments: there was the inevitable struggle for power, which first destroyed Beria, leaving Malenkov in apparent command until he was outmaneuvered by Khrushchev and Bulganin. The book does not go far enough to show Nikita Sergeyevich emerging as the undisputed leader. It is worth noting that the people Khrushchev pushed aside with the exception of Beria and his immediate acolytes were not even imprisoned, let alone murdered. About Beria he was clear and his colleagues agreed: it was either him or them. Curiously enough, what Khrushchev said and thought about Beria echoed Bukharin's comments to the Menshevik Dan about Stalin. The difference was that Bukharin did not seriously try to prevent the destruction that Stalin, he knew, was planning; Khrushchev preferred to move in first.

There were some economic reforms, and gradual release of prisoners, first criminals, which was not exactly a huge success but, after a few months, politicals; there was the abrogation of the Doctors' Plot and the release of those medics who were still alive (if only just after the torture and maltreatment).

Then there were the uprisings in the camps, put down ferociously but they did signify that some changes would have to be made. There were riots in several East European colonies, culminating in the East Berlin uprising on June 17. After that the more open attitude to the West became once again closed but cautious changes inside the country continued: a slight weakening of censorship, a slightly different economic outlook, a possible greater openness towards other countries. The book stops with all these tentative steps being taken and with the power struggle gearing up. One cannot help hoping that Professor Rubenstein will pick up the story in a following volume that will take in the uneasy years that led up to the Twentieth Congress and what happened then. Meanwhile, let me recommend this book to anyone who seriously wants to understand events in the second half of the twentieth century (and, let us face it, the beginning of the twenty-first). It is informative and moves at a thriller's pace. What more could one want?



Joshua Rubenstein:           The Last Days of Stalin
2016                                   Yale University Press