Customer Reviews

Quin's Shanghai Circus

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Whittemore's name kept popping up for me--Rick Kleffel's mentioned him on one listserv, he was mentioned on Rondua, someone else sent me a note about him--so I went on a fact-finding mission, searching the Internet for information about this elusive author. There wasn't much, but one of the hits was the first issue of a newsletter from the Council for Literature of the Fantastic in an article by Jeff VanderMeer on nine neglected works. This was part one of the article, with only five authors covered (Paul Auster, Angela Carter, Nick Cave, Steve Erickson, and Edward Whittemore). VanderMeer concentrates on Whittemore's four-novel suite, "The Sinai Tapestry," and only briefly mentions Quin's Shanghai Circus, his first novel. It sounded like my type of thing, though, so I went on a used book search and had some luck, finding both Quin's and two novels of the suite. Like normal, I start an author from his first work.

Wow. This is certainly a different kind of novel. It has an aura of its time (early 70s), but it is also unique enough to be timeless. To explain it basically, it is a novel of intertwining lives--Quin is a thirty-something American orphan who is approached in a bar by a very strange fellow who has a clue to his parents' identities. This leads Quin to Japan, accompanied by Big Gobi, a large mentally challenged man who also has something to do with Quin's parentage. They meet Father Lamereaux, and start following the thread of the story that incorporates a secret agent network that was responsible for saving untold lives in World War II by affecting Sino-Russo-Nippo relations. As the stories unfold, following one character after another, we are enmeshed in how their lives affected each other, sometimes with two or three degrees of separation. Lastly, there's one character who's not what he seems--in my faux writing terms, a third-person unreliable.

Fantastic literature? In both senses. I was amazed at the complexity of the "plot" (the story, because it is not linear, sometimes defies English 101 terms), and surprised by some of the elements, sometimes strange and grotesque. It's not truly horrific, even though some parts verge on the Clive Barker scale. At one point, the novel recounts how the last performance of the titular circus occurs, in which the performers are detached one by one, and then the ravenous beasts are let loose to feed on the audience. My stomach churned several times during those pages, and I don't think it was my stomach flu causing it to do so. One of the characters is a psychopath who is entirely too believable, making certain sections recall Thomas Harris more than C.S. Lewis. If "The Sinai Tapestry" suite is as good as this novel, Whittemore is definitely unjustly neglected, and should be reprinted.

Full of bizarre imagery and complex plot twists, this book and it's mysterious characters remain etched in my consciousness. It is a puzzle with several pieces missing but that hasn't stopped me from considering it such a satisfying read that I've read it cover to cover at least 3 times in the last ten years. If you can make it through a few stomach-churning scenes without being sick, you will be rewarded with an enjoyable "brain workout" and memories of the mysteries of the book's characters which remain long after the story is over.

*Quin's Shanghai Circus* may well be the best espionage novel of the 20th Century, as good as anything Graham Greene, John Le Carre or Somerset Maugham have written. It's a deep, dark, and magical read that does what Kafka tells us books should do: it takes an axe to the frozen sea inside us. And it's all true. Every word of it. Whittemore rules...

The books written by Edward Whittemore are not for everyone but his style appeals to me and the humanity in each of the five books are as beautiful as they are heart breaking. It is a shame that this author passed before he could continue writing.

I recommend this book, but just barely. The reviewers who convinced me to read Quin's Shanghai Circus praised Edward Whittemore's wit and compared him to Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins, but I see little similarity to those authors. Whittemore gets points for writerly craft in the way he weaves scenes to assemble his story, but I found the excessive amount of deliberately grotesque subject matter tiring.

And what does he have against quotation marks? On one level, it is clever the way you can tell who is speaking even though the narrator rarely tells you, but I found absence of quotation marks to be annoying--but I never understood why e. e. cummings wrote without capital letters, either.

After reading the book, I re-read the reviews trying to figure out what the reviewer's found so wonderful about this book. The only thing I could come up with it that the book finishes strong. From the end of the circus to the end of the book was my favorite part. Maybe the recency principle left them with a lasting good impression.

Old Earth Books will be reprinting this and the other four Whittemore novels! Google the web for "Edward Whittemore" for details.