When a writer creates fiction, he makes up conflicts and consequences as he pleases. When he writes history, he has nothing to do but get his facts and footnotes straight. In historical fiction, a writer must balance his story on the fine line of what John Updike calls “vigorous fakery” while somehow ringing true. It is often done splendidly. Many writers create a plausible other time and other place, with costumes, dialogue and morals to match. They realistically weave actual events and people with fictional characters and encounters. Or they boldly and wittily break narrative rules, in a mode that has been called magical realism.
Not quite there
But all that is not easy, and a reviewer of historical fiction hesitates to dip her bayonet in ink. Kunal Basu's novel, The Yellow Emperor's Cure , demonstrates how readers far more commonly might find themselves short of that happy place in which we care about a few characters, light up with recognition at the famous personages with whom they rub elbows, and look forward to a story in which we know how some things will end but not others. Even when we don't demand profound insights, we would like a good time.
Basu's novel is set mostly in China at the end of the 19th century, on the eve of the Boxer Rebellion. The young, philandering doctor Antonio Maria is shocked to find his father in the late stages of syphilis, which Europeans at that time often considered to be the just punishment for a sinful life. Wandering the ports of his native Lisbon, Antonio hears that people seldom see syphilitic Chinese sailors. Leaving behind a young woman whom he may one day marry, he sails to Peking to find the cure he is confident the Chinese have mastered.
Once he is in Peking, Antonio learns he cannot simply learn a cure for the pox and jump on the next boat home. The doctor to whom he is introduced sentences him to a year of study at the Empress Dowager's Summer Palace. Antonio learns that instead of attacking a disease, as Europeans do, the Chinese investigate the condition of the patient that allows disease to attack. While he is there, Antonio becomes involved with a Chinese woman, Fumi, who teaches him the rudiments of reading pulses. He gets caught up in the chaos surrounding the Boxer Rebellion. He cures natives and expats. He nurses many through the rebels' siege of the Legation, in which all the diplomats and their families are trapped. But the cure for syphilis recedes every time he reaches out to grasp it, until a chilling truth dawns on him.
But doctors back in Europe are closer to a cure and that's one of those endings we do know, so it's hard to get excited about yin and yang and qi in this context.
Doesn't work
Basu predictably uses the eunuchs who attend on Antonio to raise laughs. There is plenty of below-the-belt dialogue among his lesser characters. Those eunuchs, his pal who visits him from Portugal, his local guardian the padre, and the Europeans who infest the expat colony in Peking all fail to hold reader's interest. There must be a way of rendering the vapid emptiness of privileged colonialists without making our eyes glaze over. In telling his story, Basu ought to have made us care at least about the Portuguese doctor and his lover. But somehow none of it catches fire. Basu's astonishing short story, “The Japanese Wife”, was made into a successful film. His novel may have been created with the screen in mind, but it should have worked better on the page.
The Yellow Emperor's Cure,Kunal Basu, Picador India, 2012, p.325, Rs. 499.
