Tai-Pan: The Second Novel of the Asian Saga

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Dirk Lochlin Struan is a Scotsman who has spent a good part of his adult life in the orient amassing a fleet of clipper ships and a great fortune. Like Shogun the characters were so vividly portrayed ending the book was like saying good bye to real people. They hate and despise each other, but more than once as the plot unfolds they find themselves allied in a common cause.

Not great, but good - I remember being engaged, interested enough in the subject matter, the way the plot developed. He has made his own joss by being smarter, more ruthless, accumulating more wealth, and being stronger than his opponents.Though it took me a month to get through it (it was a very busy month and novel reading had to take a back seat) when I did sit down with it I would often go through fifty and sixty pages with no effort. The only thing I could appreciate about the ending was the poetic beauty of Hong Kong being proven to be Struan's vision by the death of Struan himself. It broke my heart a little bit and I cried, usually this would ruin the book for me, but this one was a masterpiece and I can't say even one bad thing about it. So, in the end, rather than being a balance between Eastern and Western cultures, as an Asian saga might imply, it is more Asia as seen through Anglo-Saxon eyes.

Several times throughout the book, he shows signs of having matured and being his father's son, hatching his own schemes and being in charge of his own destiny, however a few pages later he is the same insecure, naive child he was before. Clavell is best known for his epic Asian Saga series of novels and their televised adaptations, along with such films as The Great Escape, The Fly and To Sir, with Love. This is the story of his fight to establish himself and his dynasty as the undisputed masters of the Orient. Set in the turbulent days of the founding of Hong Kong in the 1840s, Tai-Pan is the story of Dirk Struan, the ruler - the Tai-Pan - of the most powerful trading company in the Far East. I was very impressed with the depth of the plot, the deftness with which Clavell pulled me into the story, and the breadth and scope he was willing to manfully shoulder to bring these characters to life.I was gonna go with Noble House but that one seems like it has a lot of shit having to do with finance, which I pretty much don’t understand a lot about. These larger than life figures are battling on a small and large scale for what is theirs, but also for what will be their childrens and their children’s children.

You can't make the protagonist laugh at every obstacle for 700 pages and then make him die from a natural disaster in a page without the reader feeling cheated. I have a bias towards historical novels and as such I liked it even 5hough this kind of narrative may not be of anyone’s taste. I don't often fall victim to employing modern-day lingo, but it offers a great way to describe Dirk Struan in a single word, and that word is Chad. He is, of course, completely over the top, and it’s this that provides a lot of the friction in the work: he’s a Scottish giant who has Plans and Schemes, and who twists representatives of the Crown around his little finger.

I never felt like I couldn't put the book down or had to read to the end of a chapter because half the time I didn't even know what I was reading about. 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. Around this time, there was an ever growing xenophobia in China that could have been more fully examined, but never reaches that point, only touched upon. Dirk's company is Noble House wish is the title of another of his books, which I will be re-reading next.