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THE YEAR OF THE WOMAN
by Jonathan Gash
Allison and Busby, October 2004
288 pages
18.99GBP
ISBN: 0749083166


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jonathan Gash's THE YEAR OF THE WOMAN, set in Hong Kong in the years just before the British handover of power to China, is a thriller, a mystery, and fantasy. Once a street child kept from starvation by a café manager, heroine KwayFay now works at an investment corporation, trying to keep her boss, the pompous, casually cruel HC Ho from firing her out of randomly redirected spite at his own setbacks.

The situation in the office and beyond heats up when Old Man, the godfather of a powerful Triad, suspects that KwayFay may have clairvoyant powers. KwayFay's cooperation could be Old Man's only hope of protecting his lucrative racketeering empire from the consequences of the coming regime change -- if her apparent powers are real.

The detail-packed, gritty realism and use of multiple insider perspectives that characterises Gash's tour of the Hong Kong underworld makes the question of whether the modern prophetess's paranormal insight is inspiration or madness engaging and difficult to answer. Indeed, this is a tale built on apparent contradictions that make sense in its busy, unique world: KwayFay's home is a corrugated metal shack, but her only possession of value is a laptop computer.

Her boss appears omnipotent to the firm's employees, but his mounting debts to a dangerous Triad gang mean that he owns nothing and his power over his own fate is merely a delusion. The conversations between KwayFay and her 'Ghost Grandmother,' in whose ancient and long-range view British rule in Hong Kong is a momentary and none-too-clear blip on a wider timeline of Chinese empery, mediate the grimness with humour.

Gash is the author of nearly 30 novels, including the Dr Clare crime series, and spent some time working in Hong Kong before the regime change. His refusal to whitewash the negligence and lack of adequate social welfare in the Crown Colony is admirable, and he shows two sides of the tale's complex context by intimating that corruption and misrule will be different under the People's Republic, but not necessarily much better.

Occasionally I wasn't sure which language -- English, various Chinese dialects, Portuguese -- the multilingual characters were intended to be speaking. Dialogue written in broken English, of which there is much in THE YEAR OF THE WOMAN, is fine if it's coming from the mouths of characters who are speaking English as a second language. If, in these scenes, the characters are speaking any language as a native tongue, they should do so somewhat more articulately.

The life of the homeless girl also appears aggravating rather than nightmarish. It is characterised by neglect rather than serious abuse, which does not match up to any nonfiction accounts of homeless women's lives in any country that I have ever read. That she hasn't ever had sex and apparently hasn't ever been seriously injured or ill needs further explanation, because it seems unusual for women and girls in her circumstances. As her ability to survive, if not live well, in these circumstances informs the most difficult decision she must make, Gash perhaps should have addressed these ambiguities.

However, Gash creates a busy, mostly believable world, and endeavours to paint it from an insider's point of view. The book is a page-turner, and an iconoclastic ending leaves the reader thinking what its implications will be and wishing to know what happens afterward.

Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, January 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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