Challenge Tuesday – 43

As reported last week, this week’s book is the sequel to last week’s book.

Book 43 – The Last Empress, by Anchee Min.  The book continues following Empress Orchid through her turbulent life as the Dowager Empress of China, exploring her growing sense of powerlessness in the face of animosity from other countries, and her desperate need to provide a strong Emperor – through blood, law or simple strength of will – for China.  Historical facts are interpreted through different eyes and the historical slant is intriguing.

However, I found this book harder to read (or more accurately, easier to not read) than the last.  It incorporates far less exploration of the fascinating world of the Forbidden City, and the peripheral characters are not ‘fleshed out’ as they were in the first book, giving them a walk-on/walk-off feel in some places.  A lot of what the Empress faced is presented as though it came and went in a moment, only to reappear eighty pages later, when you needed to remember all the details in full for it all to make sense.  There is also more of the ‘little did I know that in three months…’ type comments, foreshadowing much of the story.  This did happen in the first but seems more common in this book.

That all sounds negative, but I didn’t dislike the book, as such; I just found it frustrating to read because I wanted to know more about the times, and discover more about the characters. If the first was an assumed biography presented as a novel, this one was a politics course delivered as a newspaper article – yes there were interesting things to explore but we really only skimmed a lot of it. The writer told us of the shame and sadness felt by the characters but didn’t show it; we didn’t really explore the under-layers as I had hoped.  I guess this one is more biography than novel.

What I did find interesting was the juxtaposition of the Empress and her feelings with the representation of the foreign press; it worked well at showing her vulnerability on a wider stage and the risks she faced whatever decision she made. Her cold response to the suicide of one of the Emperor’s concubines is a reminder that she steeled herself against her own wish for death and is a very clear way of showing both how differently she is treated than she treated the Empress before her, and also how much like the woman she hated she has become.

I commented last time that I would probably not read the book again, and I think that decision has been solidified now I’ve read both.  They are interesting, and explore the potential experiences of a woman both incredibly powerful, and poorly understood.  They introduced me to a part of world history that I have very little knowledge of, and they show how people change depending on the life they experience.  Nevertheless I feel this way of looking at the life the Empress led is sufficient, and any future exploration would be through more formal biographies where I know better what to expect.

Happy reading,

EJ

🙂