Tai-Pan: The Second Novel of the Asian Saga

Product Information

In Shogun si aveva da creare lo Shogunato, il destino del Giappone era in gioco e il protagonista era il jolly pescato dall'uomo che avrebbe cambiato la storia nipponica.

What gives this book a plus, aside from the historical problems is that it is a decent drama and adventure. Tai-Pan was Clavell’s second book, first published in 1966, and is coincidentally also the second chronological book in his Asian saga of books. Whatever rules Cullum may believe exist in England dinna necessarily translate to the rough and ready wilds of empire building.This puts him somewhat apart from the likes of John Jakes, who attempts to portray the American epochs in his long Kent family chronicles and shorter Civil War epic as true as can possibly be. The most irritating thing about the book is Clavell’s Chinese character’s sense of diction, accent, and manner of speech.

Before joining Goodreads, I had already read ‘Shogun’, so you, my friendly reader, do not have the luxury of a review of that as comparison, but I believe that what I say about ‘Tai-Pan’, set in Hong Kong, can easily be said of it’s predecessor. I hate it when women are characterized as high-strung purebred horses - Clavell does this explicitly in this book in at least one scene, and implies it in others. Not the crappiest crap I've ever seen, but really - if an author has to repeat the same "foreign-flavor" word 4 times on one page, he clearly doesn't have the most innovative of spirits. Tai-Pan is an excellent historical fiction about the early days of Hong Kong and British-Chinese trade. I will talk about the finale in the spoiler below because I feel it's necessary as it made me lower my score from barely 3 stars to a fair 2 stars, but I can say without spoiling anything that I was not wrong in my assumption.While the sudden death of such a likable character certainly had an impact on me, it is without doubt one of the laziest endings I've ever witnessed in a book. We concern ourselves most primarily with Dirk Struan, Tai-Pan (Supreme Leader or Big Shot) of Struan and Company. I feel that it got a little bit messier, maybe, and a couple things got dropped entirely or never received an altogether satisfying conclusion, but it never tangled that bad. Shogun was fantastic, mysterious, complex, cruel, violent, erotic, dressed with elaborate manners and rituals, alien thought patterns, ironclad honor, smelly Europeans, the whole works - but it didn't have the Struans versus the Brocks, which crackling, bloody, rollicking, cutthroat competitive maneuverings grabbed me by the collar and yanked me into this Southwest Pacific tale, hanging me on the yardarm so that I could marvel at the entirety of the colorful, frantic pageant unfolding before my young and excited eyes.