Alexander Cordell (1914–1997)

Chan Lin-wai is a medical student who by personal circumstance flees the Kuomintang into the Red Army. What follows for a core of the book is a fictionalised personal account of his participating on the chinese long march.

While some of the personal interplay between Chan Lin-wai and the other lead characters plays out well its set amongst a sea of lesser characters who seemed to be half, and badly put together and with important battle sequences and challenges which are never allowed to develop. In the end your left with only a handful of scenes which are gripping, with characters you feel have no impact on the story itself.… (meer)

So - you have a novel published in Britain in 1967 called "The Bright Cantonese". It's a pretty good novel by a pretty good writer, but it's not going to fly off the drugstore racks with a title like that. Wait, I've got it! Let's change the title to "The Deadly Eurasian", put a naked woman with a dragon strategically wound around her on the cover, and add some cover blurbs that have nothing to do with the story! For example, "She was trained to make war by making love." Or how about, "Mei Kayling, multi-megaton sex-bomb--built for overlove and aimed at the U.S.A." I really need to check the OED to see if "overlove" is a word, and if so, if it can be traced to the back cover of this novel. And of course, don't forget to call it "a novel of sexpionage." Now, that should sell some copies!

As for the book itself, it concerns a dedicated Chinese spy, born of a Chinese mother and British father, who is infiltrated into Hong Kong to find out the origin of a bright flash in the sky which killed and blinded thousands of people in Guangdong. The suspicion is an accident at a Chinese nuclear facility, but witnesses say the flash came from a different direction. The story of how Mei Kayling leads two thousand refugees through the devastation of South China and over the Hong Kong border--making a severe personal sacrifice along the way--is worth the price of admission by itself. When she gets to Hong Kong, then moves on to Macau, in the company of an American sailor, there is yet another good story, though somewhat marred by Cordell's attempts to be poetic in the manner of John D. MacDonald, who wasn't too good at it either.

Then the novel moves on to its final location for a twisting climax that the Los Angeles Times described, in an accurate blurb on the back cover, as a "cataclysmic shocker". So, by all means pick up this book if you come across it in your local dusty poorly lighted used book store. Despite its age, it actually hasn't dated badly. Some of the politics are a little outdated--the average Chinese spy today would be as likely to swear allegiance to Louis Vuitton as to Chairman Mao, but the dangers of Chinese-American misunderstanding and of forces beyond the control of either government are still pretty relevant. Above all, the story stands out for being a fairly original and consistently compelling story, aided by the strict first person narrative of Mei Kayling. We see everything unfold through her eyes, and despite her overabundance of enthusiasm for party doctrine, she remains a pretty shrewd observer of human nature.… (meer)