Shanghai Station [Hardcover]

Bartle Bull (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 10, 2003

A masterful storyteller at the top of his form, Bartle Bull follows the successes of his popular African novels A Cafe on the Nile and The Devil’s Oasis with an equally compelling tale of political terror and personal vengeance that unfolds in China’s colorful, turbulent port city of Shanghai. Revolution has been born in China by 1918, where Mao Tse-tung and the Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin stir the peasantry with oratory and the Communist dream. Their fiery words reach Jessica James, too, as do the machinations of the ruthless Russian commissar Viktor Polyak, who makes this rebellious daughter of American missionaries his tool. From another Russia comes the well-born Alexander Karlov. He arrives in Shanghai with a mission, for the Bolsheviks have brutally killed his mother and abducted his twin sister. Vengeance commands Alexander’s soul. It also entangles him in perilous alliances—with the Cossack hetman Ivan Semyonov; with Mei-lan, a woman who knows Shanghai’s darkest secrets; with “Big Ear,” leader of the city’s most powerful Triad; with the French police; and with a spirited young American woman who calls herself Jesse James. This rousing historical adventure sweeps the reader along into the dangerous political intrigues of exotic Shanghai.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Shifting his setting from Cafe on the Nile's mid-1930s Africa, Bull is back with another bloody good atmospheric (and frankly erotic) historic swashbuckler, this time set in Shanghai at the end of WWI. Fleeing the Bolsheviks in September 1918, 17-year-old Alexander Karlov and his mother and twin sister abandon their vast Russian estate (where five generations of his family have bred and trained black chargers for the czars) and take the Trans-Siberian railway 4,000 miles east to the port of Vladivostok, intending to reunite with Count Karlov, Alexander's soldier/father. When the train is attacked by Bolsheviks and Alexander's leg is broken, he must look helplessly on as his mother is murdered and his sister kidnapped by ruthless commissar Viktor Polyak. Taking their prize horses, Alexander and his father escape Vladivostok on a freighter just ahead of the Bolsheviks, looking to make a new life in exotic Shanghai. There, Mao Zedong and Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin are urging the downtrodden Chinese peasants to revolution, and Jessica James, 18, the impressionable daughter of passive missionaries, has come under Mao's thrall. Alexander barely sets foot on shore when, in rapid-fire order, he succumbs to the charms of his rich cousin's wanton mistress, rescues Shanghai's most infamous madam and helps his father establish Salle d'Armes, a riding and fencing school-all this before he meets Jesse, becomes a racing jockey and gets revenge on Polyak. Typical of Bull's sweeping epics, this unflinchingly gory yarn evokes the sights, sounds, tastes and scents of a splendidly decadent era.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

From the author of A Cafe on the Nile (1998) and The Devil's Oasis (2001) comes another exotic tale populated with an ethnically diverse and ever-overlapping cast of characters. As Mao Tse-tung begins preaching revolution and Soviet agents infiltrate neighboring China, cultures clash and fates intertwine in the international port city of Shanghai in 1918. Alexander Karlov is an aristocratic young Russian seeking vengeance against the Bolsheviks who murdered his mother and kidnapped his sister. Viktor Polyak, the Russian commissar who led the assault on the Karlov family, is waging a brutal underground war against Russian emigres who have settled in Shanghai. He enlists the help of Jessica James, the idealistic and politically naive daughter of American missionaries. Eventually realizing she has been duped, Jessica joins forces with Alexander to bring Polyak down. Once again, Bull is able to reach back in time, authentically replicating the sights, sounds, and texture of a chaotic time and place in history. Moving along at a dizzying clip, this tautly crafted adventure will entertain and enthrall a wide spectrum of readers. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf; 1st Carroll & Graf Ed edition (December 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786713143
• ISBN-13: 978-0786713141
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #583,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bull looks like he's kicking off another rollicking series, October 13, 2005

By 

Scott Schiefelbein (Portland, Oregon United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shanghai Station (Hardcover)

Bartle Bull proved that he could spin an exotic, thrilling yarn with his North African novels ("The White Rhino Hotel," "A Cafe on the Nile," and "The Devil's Oasis"). These novels were not "Great Literature," but they were fascinating tales of derring-do, high romance, and dastardly villainy set in the romantic WWI - WWII era. Creating strong characters and vividly capturing the harsh beauty of North Africa (as well as the seedy aspects of city life in such cesspools as Cairo), Bull transported the reader to a world he knows exceedingly well from first-hand knowledge.

In "Shanghai Station," Bull launches what appears to be an exciting new series of novels, as "Station" bears all the hallmarks of a "kick-off" first novel.

The novel opens in Northwestern Russia at the outbreak of the Communist Revolution in 1917. Our hero, Alexander Karlov, is the only son of the noble soldier, Count Karlov. Alexander must help his mother and twin sister Katia flee via the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok, and then to Shanghai, to meet their father, who is off fighting the Communists. Tragedy strikes as the train is attacked by Communists, and there is murder and a kidnapping.

Alexander arrives in Shanghai with a shattered leg and a vengeful heart . . . along with the aromatic tobacco pipe of the novel's arch-villain, the Communist fanatic Victor Polyak. Reunited with his father, Alexander and the Count escape to Shanghai, which at this time is the Casablanca of the Orient. Thousands of Europeans populate this city, one of the largest in the world, with official settlements. Alexander and his father must scrape out a living in an unforgiving cityscape of cutthroats, prostitutes, thieves, warlords, corrupt government officials, and the Chinese gangs known as the Triads. They meet friends and foes, and it's not always clear whether a friend is indeed a friend, or if a foe is actually a foe.

At the same time, the young gorgeous American Jessica James, daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, is trying to help the embryonic Communist Revolution in China. Zealous, motiviated by classic "American Christianity," Jessica (or "Jesse," as she likes to be called), is swept up in forces she doesn't entirely understand. To say that she undergoes a harsh maturation process would be an understatement.

By the end of the novel, the reader is breathless from the triumphs and travails of our heroes and villains. The final scene, a wake for a beloved character, concludes with a toast "To Shanghai!" It is a toast the evokes the hope that Bull will continue to explore this rich city and his band of intrepid characters, and that he does so soon.

In a novel that ranges from the Mongolian steppe to the most intimate pleasure rooms of a Shanghai brothel, "Shanghai Station" transports the reader to a distant, romantic, lethal world. Bull captivates with his description of the ravenous "debt collectors" used by a Shanghai crime lord to teach lessons that last a lifetime as much as with his lush descriptions of the repellent Russian Prince Krupotkin, a distant cousin of Alexander's who runs a thriving casino in Shanghai.

From the author's notes in the book, this novel is intensely personal. His father and uncles spent a lot of time in Shanghai and had a close friendship with a royal Russian. The Bull family's devotion to the art of fencing also comes through, as does their fascination with the most noble of animals, the horse. Bull concedes that he has made several deviations from the historical record, and that's fine -- we're not reading Bartle Bull's novels as a surrogate for actual history. We're reading it for thrills, chills, laughter and tears. And Bull brings the goods fast and furious.

Check it out, and let's hope that Bull can continue the series with more novels to come.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shanghai 1919, March 30, 2005

By 

Smallchief - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Shanghai Station (Hardcover)

Bartle Bull has written three adventure novels about Africa, all of which feature exotic, bizarre, and highly-sexed characters. In "Shanghai Station" he shifts locales to China and writes a book that is more of a conventional adventure tale.

Young Alexander Karlov is one of many White Russians fleeing the Communists after World War I and the Bolshevik revolution. Fate leads him to Shanghai, where he meets an intiguing combination of Chinese gangsters and (...), European degenerates, American missionaries, and Russian revolutionaries. He hunts -- and is in turn hunted by -- the Bolshevik responsible for the death of his mother and the kidnapping of his sister. Bull does an excellent job of creating the atmosphere of what was one of the most fascinating and mysterious cities of the era. I would have given this book five stars had it probed a bit deeper into Shanghai and the revolutionary currents sweeping China after World War I. (The best novel about China of this period is probably "The Call" by John Hersey which is about an American missionary.)

Bull is a better than average writer and he gets the facts right about the exotic places about which he writes. This novel and Bull's earlier novels about Africa are fast-paced exciting reads.

Smallchief

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A spirited and compelling tale leaving a thirst for more, January 21, 2006

By 

Bruce Bourgoine (Maine, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shanghai Station (Paperback)

Mount your spirited Mongolian pony, unsheathe your sword, and be prepared to charge into another enthralling story by Bartle Bull in Shanghai Station. Once again Bull weaves an adventurous tale that takes one completely to another place and time. Tragic moments and characters with critical insight into themselves introduce and seduce you into following their lives with vivid concern. The detailed beauty and brutality of Shanghai early in the last century forms a story backdrop one is drawn to each time s/he cracks open the book.

As with the compelling series begun with The White Rhino Hotel, the setting and characters have transported the reader to a place where there is a thirst for more storytelling. We now care about the young Count Karlov and Ms. Jesse James and are concerned about the possible survival of Commissar Polyak and the anticipated financial manipulations of Mr. Hak Lee. Readers will not merely expect Shanghai Station to be the beginning of another great series but demand it.