Customer Reviews

King Of The Golden Valley

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This novel opens on a short prologue ,set in Chinese Turkestan during 1939.Musa Alun ,a courier employed by the British Consulate is swept away by an avalanche and the letters and packages he is carrying are buried under tons of snow .

We then move forward to London in the mid 1980's .One of the long buried packages comes to the psssession of Daniel Wynter an unemployed navy veteran who is living with the successful televsion writer Julia .The package was written by his grandfather and hinta at a scandal involving himself and a man named Holland ,revolvinh around the Peking-London automobile race in 1910

Daniel digs into the case ,being rebuffed by Victiria Hollandse the daughter of the Hiollande mentioned in the letter .eventually with the help of a pulp fiction writer ,Preece he uncoverrs some of the truth .

Daniels grandfather had been falsely accused of sabotaging Hollandes vehicle in the race and espite strenous efforts wyner was unable eo clear his name

Victia Holland agrees to finanace an expedition to the area -now part of China .wyner ,Julia,Victoria and Parker an employee of Holland embark on the trip during the course of which they make a number of discoveries about the truth behind the accusations and have a run in with the Chinese military who are anxious to prevent the truth of their depredations in the area leaking out to the West

The major obstacle to total absorbtion in the book lies with its structure .It moves fro 1939 to 1985 ;we are then given long excerpts from Wynter's diaries of the race which are facinating when dealing with actual historical background such as the changing face of Chinese politics in 1910 but do unforunately distance the reader from total involvement .the diary excerpts are surrounded by other interpolations -such as interviews ,press articles etc-and the " narrated by diverse hands" structure makes for choppy reading

The last section -as the expedition move into the Golden valley is the best and is quite gripping

Despite being

well written and nicely characterised this is just short of top drawer thanks mainly to its jumping back and forth in time as well as by its multi-narrator structure