An Insular Possession by Timothy Mo

First published: 1986

Type of work: Historical satire

Time of work: The early 1830’s and 1840’s, including the outbreak of the Opium War and Great Britain’s colonization of Hong Kong

Locale: Canton, the Macao Peninsula, Lin Tin Island, and Hong Kong

Principal Characters:

• Gideon Chase, the protagonist, an American clerk and eventually a scholar of the Chinese language
• Walter Eastman, his mentor and colleague, a part-time journalist and painter
• Alice Remington, Eastman’s romantic interest, the niece of an American company senior partner
• Harry O’Rourke, a drunken British painter and an elder friend of Eastman and Chase
• Father Joaquim Ribeiro, a confidant and tutor of Chase
• Pedro Remedios, a pirate adventurer and collaborator in Chase’s journalistic investigations

The Novel

Presiding over the southern China trading world of An Insular Possession is the mighty British Empire, a rigid and notorious taskmaster of the native Chinese. In the century previous to the time of the novel, the Chinese wielded a precarious upper hand over the British: The empire’s gluttonous demand for tea indebted it to these chief suppliers of the commodity, and it paid in pounds of silver. The solution to Great Britain’s damaged economy lay in creating a viable trading commodity. The Empire turned to its largest colony, India, sent its laborers into the poppy fields and, subsequently, by increments and stealth induced in the Chinese an opium addiction that surpassed even the British taste for tea. In short order, England found itself not only breaking even on the trade but also filching enough silver from the Chinese to operate the government in India. As the novel begins, however, the trading network is in another stage of transition. The native bristles under the heavy hand of the foreigner, yet must be fed by it; the foreigner tightens the grip on his vicious monopoly before it dissipates.

The struggle for dominance embroils combatants and bystanders alike, most notably the American traders of the Meridian Company in Canton. Yet in the midst of the turmoil, the Americans declare their own innocence and even a higher calling. Trading precious silver for innocuous silks and porcelain, they disdain the illicit opium trade and pride themselves as harbingers of culture bent on drawing China into the greater world of civilized nations. The bravado and the sanctimony of this upstart country is epitomized by Walter Eastman, a brash twenty-four-year-old senior clerk and dilettante painter, and Gideon Chase, a junior clerk of seventeen and willing protege of his idol, Eastman. While the Chinese suffer, Eastman and Chase pass idle days drinking fine bottles of claret and amusing themselves with a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) on the neighboring peninsula of Macao, the social mecca where wives and children are comfortably billeted. Their weighty culture is never wasted on the Chinese, and their concern for the natives is, similarly, a passive, intellectual fancy.

The irony of the Americans’ arrogance is emphasized when the Meridian senior partners find their own company in financial straits and resort themselves to the opium trade. Although apparently outraged, Eastman and Chase remain at their posts. Eastman, having secretly won the heart of Alice Remington, the niece of a Meridian senior partner, will not jeopardize his romance with an impassioned resignation; Chase refuses to abandon his colleague and mentor. When Eastman’s affair is discovered, however, his employer dismisses him on the grounds of insufficient means. Only the climax of the novel, the outbreak of the Opium War, can cover Eastman’s disgrace. At the urging of Chase, he starts a newspaper to rival the pro-British Canton Monitor, cleverly turning his humiliating dismissal into a bold, principled gesture in support of the exploited Chinese.

As publishers of The Lin Tin Bulletin and River Bee, Eastman and Chase reach a new height of moral indignation, documenting the war while it teeters between cautious strikes by the Chinese (the destruction of a cache of opium on Lin Tin Island) and decimating victories for the British (the obliteration of entire landscapes by the ironside steamer Nemesis). The war marks a crucial division in the relationship of Eastman and Chase: Although both men recognize their previous hypocrisies and their tacit sanction of a trading network founded on “enrichment (for the few) and enslavement and degradation (for the many),” Eastman, as writer, remains segregated from the Chinese, while Chase, as investigator, nurtures a growing empathy with them. With aplomb, then, Eastman attacks the savage British exploits but derives, in truth, more pleasure from the insults bandied between himself and the conservative editor of the Canton Monitor, a verbal repartee that leads ultimately to a duel with pistols not unlike the climactic scenes of The Rivals. Chase, on the other hand, witnesses among other atrocities the degrading rape of two Chinese women by a band of Indian soldiers and, under the guidance and tutelage of friends Harry O’Rourke and Father Joaquim Ribeiro, begins to study the complexities and guarded secrets of the Chinese language. It is this latter, supreme effort which finally distinguishes Chase, for in their language he finds the soul of the Chinese people, that “insular possession” which may not be traded or crippled by the foreigner.

The end of the Opium War draws the conflict of nations to another temporary peace. The Chinese are partly compromised from within by an emperor himself profiting on the opium trade, yet they succeed in pushing the British a step farther downstream to Hong Kong Island. Through gratuitous violence, the British, for their part, prove their conceit that might makes right and satisfy themselves with fortifying the new island possession. Eastman and Chase, in contrast, may no longer coexist. The ostensible purpose of their newspaper eliminating the opium trade is abandoned in the new tide of blind conservatism, and with it the ostensible relationship of mentor and protege must be relinquished as well. By the end of the novel, the static, perennially superficial Eastman is easily surpassed by Chase, the true protagonist, whose newfound possessions combine sharp intellect with probing sensitivity. Two such disparate men will naturally part company as will, it seems, two such incompatible nations.

The Characters

If the comic irony of An Insular Possession precludes identifying with Timothy Mo’s characters, they are nevertheless fascinating for their intellectual prowess and dramatic flair. Most subtle among them is certainly Walter Eastman. In a moment conniving to charm the socialite Alice Remington, directing a cast of temperamental amateur actors, eliciting the pity of staunch British patriots for the beleaguered Chinese, disparaging his journalistic rival with the most artful gibes, and perceptively arguing the merits of Impressionist art even while developing techniques of the new daguerreotype, he is an imposing intelligence detached, perhaps so versatile as to be spread too thin, but a master showman. His diversity is appropriately conveyed through a variety of stylistic devices: The narrative is eclipsed by theatrical script, newspaper extracts, letters, and diary entries that illustrate Eastman’s felicity in assuming a persona to suit any occasion. Ultimately, however, his stagecraft is not meant to be deceptive but defensive. His nose somewhat eaten away by smallpox, his pate balding, he is reputed to be the ugliest man in Canton. If he is, then, conceived by Mo as essentially comic, it is because he wishes his compatriots to perceive him as such. Lacking the commodity of beauty, he trades on his wit.

Gideon Chase, however, emerges from the novel more fully realized and empathetic. With both his parents deceased, he arrives in Canton for the second time, hoping to secure a position with the American trading company. When the slightly older Eastman takes a patronizing interest, he latches on to the surrogate father, eager to learn from him, willing to defer to him in all matters. Typically, Eastman leads Chase through the labyrinth of fine wines, offers the boy his first cheroot, teaches him the conventions of love, and imbues in him a heady respect for the Chinese. Yet Chase’s coming of age eventually shapes the novel. When Eastman finds himself dismally unemployed, Chase rescues him with the inspiration of The Lin Tin Bulletin and River Bee, even providing a salvaged printing press. When Eastman’s editorializing draws near pomposity, Chase reprimands him. Step by step, Chase’s naivete and humility evolve into a compassionate authority, precisely because he enters the foreign world as a child. The Chinese language, a matter of indifference to the didactic Eastman, is inherited by Chase as by all infants of the culture and hence becomes the perfect metaphor for his growth. By the novel’s end, Chase chooses for his parent not Eastman but China herself.

Acting as a buffer for the Americans is the sixty-two-year-old Briton Harry O’Rourke. For the most part dispensable to the plot, he becomes an often wise though curmudgeonly sounding board for the two young anarchists. He has seen enough of the world in India and China to appreciate and even encourage their idealistic assaults; as a legitimate artist brilliant with impressionist landscapes, he inspires their creativity. Yet O’Rourke’s character, in the last analysis, is a contrivance, an opportunity for Mo to comment on British despotism. Thrasonical, drunken, cowardly, O’Rourke fled responsibilities to family and debtors in India to live parasitically among the Chinese. Capable of manipulating landscapes into art, he fails miserably with portraits, which require empathy with the subject. He is, finally, the archetypal Briton, capable of dispassionately molding a foreign landscape to fit his vision, but eventually despoiling it for the natives and deserting the travesty once its usefulness has passed.

In a similar vein, Mo’s minor characters often remain loose threads in the fabric of the novel yet testify to his comic invective. Alice Remington, once the central love interest, vanishes from the pages after spurning Eastman, but her letters wryly accent the irony of her life in Macao: Following lengthy passages devoted to plays, parties, and romantic interludes, a postscript briefly announces the start of the Opium War. The free trader and part-time corsair Pedro Remedios, usefully employed by the British during the Opium War, is convicted and executed by order of the magistrate for the pirating which in war had been a service but in peace became a crime. Finally, the kindly Jesuit priest Ribeiro, sympathetic to the Chinese, takes his exercise in the form of painstakingly rolling boulders up and down the seashore; his Sisyphean efforts, it seems, embody the only righteous plan of action for the moral man: to persevere.

Critical Context

An Insular Possession, Mo’s third novel, broadens the scope of his previous work, rendering the multifaceted world through a collage of forms, but maintains the essentially comic perception of divergent characters and cultures at odds with each other, the ramifications of a British Empire spread too far. Like his second novel, the critically successful Sour Sweet (1982), it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, firmly establishing Mo as a major British Commonwealth novelist.

Like the modern British novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, Mo implicitly condemns the British exploits of the Victorian period. Born of rampant egotism, Great Britain’s colonization depended on breaking the will of foreign nations and eventually dissipated the strength of the mother country herself, making it, in retrospect, difficult to justify. Yet Mo consistently steers clear of pontifical accusations himself; drawing his social commentary from sardonically etched characters in fundamentally improbable circumstances, he conceives this historical era as a grand, if somewhat regrettable, farce. To this end, he chooses the postmodern path of viewing the past from a contemporary perspective. As in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Mo’s narrator has the benefit of hindsight. As it does for other novelists in the postmodern movement, the mollifying distance of time provides Mo new solutions to the problem of resurrecting a culture from the ashes of an empire.

Bibliography

London Review of Books. Review. VIII (June 5, 1986), p. 20.

Listener. Review. CXV (May 8, 1986), p. 25.

New Statesman. Review. CXI (May 9, 1986), p. 27.

The Observer (London). Review. May 11, 1986, p. 24.

The Spectator. Review. CCLVI (May 10, 1986), p. 36.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. May 9, 1986, p. 498.