In 1950s Hong Kong, Claire Pendleton arrives with her husband Martin who works for the Water Board. Claire becomes board or anxious and begins teaching piano lessons to an affluent Chinese family, Victor and Melody Chen and their young daughter Locket. Here she meets the driver, Will Truesdale, and begins having an affair.
Will has been in Hong Kong for many years and was in love with Trudy Liang, a Euroasian of Chinese and Portugese decent. Trudy is the belle of the ball in pre-WWII Hong Kong, the daughter of an heiress and a debutante (or something similar, I searched for a word). She is vivacious and tenacious and all those "acious" words that people use to describe the life of the party. Read: the girl everyone hates but secretly wants to be.
The more I read about this region during this time period the more I want to read. The history framing the central story was really interesting, if the characters themselves were less compelling. It started off really slowly, and then sort of raced to the finish line. I felt sort of confused as it wrapped up and didn't quite understand all that was happening.
Specifically at one point, where a plot is revealed while in a certain persons perspective that this individual could not have known. This bothered me throughout the last 20% of the book. Why did the author reveal this fact at this point and then have the "ta-da" moment at the very end? It confused me. As I'm probably confusing you but trying not to reveal too much.
I didn't like a single character in this book. They were all unloveable. Your classic anti-hero story where Will refuses to do something, making him a good guy, but pays for it the rest of his life by regretting not doing that which would have made him evil. It was hard to like him for his principles when he hated himself for not breaking them.
Claire is a theif and that's never explained fully. Obviously she's a bored housewife who is confused by Asia but yet doesn't miss England.
Trudy is mean spirited and selfish and petty. The author tries at the end to reverse this opinion of her, by showing her actions as sacrificial rather than self-serving. I don't see it. She still seems the petulant child to me, who let it go when she didn't get her way but refused to save herself or others with her petulance.
All that having been said ... me not liking the characters did not stop me from enjoying the book. Odd, I know. But the story carries itself and the historical backdrop of Asia in WWII is fascinating. Dark, sad, scary and horrible in some cases, but fascinating.
Point of note though, it changes perspective in almost a dizzing way. And at first I didn't mind. But than it became more and more annoying as the author used it to build suspense. She would get half way through a story in one time period (1953) and then break in the middle and go back to the past (1940s). It was disorienting.
Definitely worth picking up, despite it's faults. It was a compelling story.
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