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THE WHITE MIRROR
by Elsa Hart
Minotaur, September 2016
310 pages
$25.99
ISBN: 1250074967


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Globe-trotting novelist Elsa Hart fell in love with southwestern China in 2010, and set her critically acclaimed first novel, THE JADE DRAGON MOUNTAIN, there. It features the eighteenth-century imperial librarian turned amateur sleuth Li Du. That bibliophilic bureaucrat with a "talent for deduction" returns in Hart's second novel, THE WHITE MIRROR, which is just as captivating a journey as the first.

The second Li Du tale takes place on the road to Lhasa, a space of many cross-cultural encounters and boundary disputes, from which it is impossible to go home entirely unchanged. Hart's perceptive recreation of the politics of eighteenth-century China and Tibet mingles with her evident love of storytelling for storytelling's sake to make THE WHITE MIRROR a riveting murder mystery.

In THE WHITE MIRROR, it's 1718 -- a decade after the events of THE JADE DRAGON MOUNTAIN. Li Du is traveling to Lhasa on imperial business when he finds a murdered mystic halfway across a bridge. Painted on the mystic's body is a strange symbol: the titular "white mirror." Stopping at a mountain village, Li Du learns that the dead man was a celebrated painter named Dhamo. Who would have wanted a painter killed? And why would they have marked him with a white mirror? Li Du investigates--and finds out that Dhamo's fate is intertwined with his own.

The mystery of the white mirror is genuinely difficult to guess, but worth following on account of Hart's fascinating cast of supporting characters. Another member of the caravan, the western Muslim storyteller Hamza, steals the show with his detailed, improbably, apparently timeless iterated tales, which are reminiscent of the alf-layla-wa-layla ("one thousand and one nights," better known in the west as the "Arabian Nights"). Two devoted brothers, one destined to be a Tibetan lama, add hope to Li Du's dangerous world. There is also a mysterious traveling woman, an obnoxious Capuchin missionary, a cryptic diplomat, and more. They are good fellow travelers for the journey that Hart imagines.

Hart's language is eloquent and her characters' aphorisms and paradoxes memorable. Li Du mentions "scholars [...] who claim it is possible to experience all the epiphanies of travel within the mind, to move through distant landscapes without leaving home." It's this kind of armchair-travel experience that Hart strives to create, while acknowledging that, to the traveler, the culture visited and his or her own receding one have a tendency to respectively remain and become inscrutable. I look forward to the continuation of Li Du's adventures, whenever it should appear.

§ Rebecca Nesvet is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She specializes in nineteenth-century literature. https://uwgb.academia.edu/RebeccaNesvet

Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, September 2016

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