Tantalizing tales to beguile vacation hours
NOBLE HOUSE by James Clavell Delacorte; 1,206 pages; $19.95
Weighing in at almost four pounds, James Clavell's Noble House is literally the summer's big book, an alternative challenge for those who keep vowing to read War and Peace. Tolstoy, after all, spent his words on some 15 years of European history; Clavell covers a mere ten days in bygone Hong Kong. Sample chapter heading: "11:58 p.m."
Few contemporary writers can match Clavell's sense of place, a talent that evoked feudal Japan in Shogun. Here he recalls the febrile life of the Crown Colony in August 1963. If the countless ayeeyahs make the book occasionally sound like Terry and the Pirates, there is much to ayeeyah about: murder, kidnaping, smuggling, a fire on a floating restaurant, a typhoon and a disastrous mudslide that helps sort out the convoluted plot.
The central story locks two great financial houses, Struan & Co. (the "Noble House") and Rothwell-Gornt, in a mortal struggle. Throughout, playing off the rivals, are an American entrepreneur and his 26-year-old female partner, an executive sweet who seems a bit anachronistic for 1963. For readers who tire of bank runs and stock manipulations, the author weaves in an elaborate spy story that involves the CIA, the KGB, Britain's MI-6 and the spy networks of both Chinas. The sex is rather decorous, but for sports buffs, there are rousing horse races. And the roiling cast of characters includes people like Four Finger Wu and Good-weather Poon. Ayeeyah.
OUTSIDE OVER THERE by Maurice Sendak Harper & Row; unpaginated; $12.95
In 350 words, Maurice Sendak manages to evoke a mythic land peopled by the familiar (a mother and two daughters) and the wholly exotic (goblins and dream-scapes), where natural law, like the reader, is held in suspense. The time is the past indefinite; costumes indicate the 19th century, but there are references to the 1930s, and at one time Mozart can be seen working at a hammerklavier. Ida, the oldest girl, is given charge of her baby sister. When she grows inattentive, faceless creatures steal in and exchange the child for a simulacrum made of ice. Frantic, Ida climbs backward out her window and into the sky, tumbling through worlds of arbors and harbors, moonlight and lamplight, irrevocable loss and paradise regained. In the end the villainous goblins are revealed as babies, but in the author's view this makes them no less terrifying: What could be more incessant and demanding than an infant? At each turn, Sendak provides illustrations that refer to—and bear comparison, with—the putti of Raphael, Da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks and the entire school of German Romanticism. The sprung rhythms of the text and the richly allusive paintings do not make Outside Over There inappropriate for children. Even the very young can appreciate the work on its outer level. But only adults can wholly understand a work that has been merchandized as juvenilia and is, instead, the most unusual novel of the season.
LICENSE RENEWED by John Gardner Marek; 285 pages; $9.95