The Precipice
Shogun isn’t even his best book…
Was it happenstance? Or was it one of those little quirks that begs us to question the supposed randomness of the world? I suppose I will never know.
Either way, I happened to have been reading the most interesting of books when news broke of Her Majesty the Queen’s death, some two years ago last month.
I am today fuzzy on the cause of her demise and am too lazy to bother looking it up. Perhaps she died of a broken heart. The scorched state of her empire had to have been more than her ticker could bear. Or perhaps she died of exasperation. She came in with Churchill. She went out two days after Truss. That’s what we call precipitous.
I was, at the time of her death, endeavoring a certain protracted convalescence. To help keep my mind off my uselessness, I had decided to at least catch up on some reading. So I’d buried myself in a book – it was a doorstop of a thing – one which I had actually begun earlier in the summer, with quite some earnestness. But as with most books in my adult life, deadlines and children and bills and tax season and various other things had gotten in the way. Time is luck, as they say, and that year’s dreadful little summer had been short on both time and luck. Then came my convalescence. Time suddenly made itself abundant. Thus, before I knew it, I’d immersed myself in the novel and had become terribly, terribly hooked. Each page seemed like a cliffhanger. Couldn’t put the thing down.
The doorstop in question was a novel, Noble House, which is part of the so-called Asian Saga by the late, great James Clavell, he of Shogun fame. It is not a criticism of Noble House nor a dismissal of its excellence to say that the best part of the whole damn thing might well be the dedication:
I would like to offer this work as a tribute to Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth II, to the people of Her Crown Colony of Hong Kong, and perdition to their enemies.
That’s a hell of an inscription. Perdition to their enemies. Right on, that. Bloody well right indeed.
At any rate, when the Queen died, and as I found myself neck deep in this novel dedicated to her, I couldn’t help but suddenly ponder, at some considerable length, what it once meant to be British.
To be fair, I have pondered this before. Anglophiles tend to do that. My own Anglophilia is primarily a matter of patrimony. But it is not helped by books like Clavell’s, which is so chock full of a stirring sense of British patriotism that one starts seeing hedgerows and Burke’s big oaks even where neon and pavement sprawl.
Funnily enough, Clavell was an Australian by birth, but he came from a long line of British naval officers. For this and maybe for other reasons, the glory of the empire coursed through his veins and through his fingertips, and eventually on through to his typewriter keys, smudging the pages of every line of his writing with echoed cries for Harry, England, and Saint George. Each letter of every sentence might as well have been a Union Jack stamp.
That stamp is heavy in Noble House, ostensibly a novel about the tai-pan of Struan’s, a Scottish trading house in Hong Kong. Struan’s is unofficially known as the “Noble House” because it is the most influential and powerful of the trading companies that made Hong Kong the crown jewel of British colonies. Struan’s got its start in Hong Kong’s pirate days, running opium to fuel the silk and tea trade. It’s crackling stuff.
Noble House’s protagonists are corporate raiders and cunning tycoons of industry, in many ways the descendants of yesteryear’s pirates and opium smugglers. They are all full of a certain spirited ambition, as well as of whisky and brandy and more than a little bit of shrewdness (and good joss). Their spiritedness, of course, is a bit of an anachronism, and was so even at the time the doorstop went to press. It was, and is, I believe an anachronism borne of Clavell’s Australian birth. For, Britain may well be at the center of his books, but the Australian influence is noticeable. His heroes, you see, have a decidedly industrious, indominable independence to them, one that, though it may have been British once upon a time, really only survived as a virtue out in the distant ports of the realm, thriving there even as it waned among the hedgerows and rain swept oaks back home. Frontiers have that effect, I suppose.
Another thing that is unmistakably British in Clavell’s books, Noble House included, is a sheer dedication to trade and markets, to commerce as a decidedly British development and a cornerstone, not just of her economics, but of her culture. Napoleon derided Britain as a nation of merchants, but merchants we were, and on the backs of these merchant classes greatness was achieved. The empire upon which the sun famously never sat wasn’t really built by saber and mast and cannon but by trade. Trade backed by a mighty navy, sure. But trade.
Today in my country, the two major Presidential candidates are clamoring over one another to see who can outrace the other to subsidize factories and whole industries, to see who can tax this or tariff that at a higher clip. And most Americans are cheering one or the other on. Newsweek was right. “We are all socialists now…” Don’t get me wrong. I like a good tariff. Disraeli was right about the corn laws. But we live in a global economy and wholesale turning our backs on free trade is going to get us what it got our forebearers across the pond. A backwards fall over the precipice.
At least we haven’t a Queen to exasperate to death.
