Gisors is the remote, detached sage representing the pole of wise impassivity with his son Kyo as the active hero and Communist. He gets to say the title of the book:
The king’s power is the power to govern, isn’t it? But man has no urge to govern: he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man’s fate, I was saying. Not powerful: all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head: every man dreams of being god.”
The god like plan is to create a utopia after the Marxian pattern. The Moscow international brigade is in Shanghai. They are in power here but their plan is to allow the Kuomintang Nationalists (K.M.T.) to take charge of the revolution army and carry the bourgeoisie with them and satisfy the workers and peasants with gaudy promises of debt forgiveness etc. The Chinese Communist Party want to have an understanding with Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang is wary of the communists bearing arms and so to keep him happy they must surrender their weapons which they are unwilling to do. The drama is set up for what the Chinese euphemistically call ‘the Shanghai incident’, or mass slaughter of the communists by the K.M.T.
The deep chess strategy from Moscow seems to be to sacrifice the local communists and allow the more stable K.M.T. to govern and from that position subvert it.
“First extend the Revolution, and then deepen it … ” answered Kyo, more as a question than as an answer. “The line of the International seems to be to leave the power here to the bourgeoisie. Provisionally. … We shall be robbed. I have seen couriers from the front: all workers’ movements are prohibited behind the lines. Chiang Kai-shek has had strikers fired on—after taking a few precautions. . ..”
That in short, as the man said, puts you in the picture. Malraux had a deep knowledge, from his reading, of the machinations of the several factions. His claim to having a role in the K.M.T. was one of his confabulations. To have imagined the situation, to have become deeply immersed in its detail, was for him to have been really there. Does he bring us there? Yes. Right from the start we are engaged, knowing what will come and yet feeling the tension, hoping for ‘with one bound he was free’. No, sorry. Not the case; only poltroons evade their fate.
The cast of characters is truly international with only Ch’en the assassin being the only pure blood Chinaman as the translator calls les indegenes. Remember this was published in 1933 and won the Goncourt in that year. Political correctness was still the province of Marxist pedants. Ch’en is revealed in the opening pages steeling himself for his first assassination.
SHOULD he try to raise the mosquito-netting? Or should he strike through it? Ch’en was torn by anguish: he was sure of himself, yet at the moment he could feel nothing but bewilderment—his eyes riveted to the mass of white gauze that hung from the ceiling over a body less visible than a shadow, and from which emerged only that foot half-turned in sleep, yet living—human flesh.
It seems almost like a panel of a graphic novel. Through several pages we are there with a man who has yet to be initiated into murder. Razor or dagger which to use. Hysteria grips him but it is the mundane fact of a sudden snore that -
The body turned gently towards the right. Was he going to wake up now? With a blow that would have split a plank Ch’en struck through the gauze. Sensitive to the very tip of the blade, he felt the body rebound towards him, flung up by the springs of the bed. He stiffened his arm furiously to hold it down: like severed halves drawn to each other, the legs sprang together towards the chest; then they jerked out, straight and stiff.
Brilliant opening. There are several set piece actions in the novel that seem made for casts of thousands cinema. Eisenstein, Zinneman, Costa-Gravas, Cimino, Bertolucci all failed to bring it to the screen. We ask whether the metaphysical discussions would travel into the more gross realms of celluloid? Probably not but there’s a lot left over. Malraux who loved the cinema as an art form would have been delighted by these accolades and intrigued by the problem: what shall we do with John Malkovich, Uma Thurman, Daniel Day-Lewis and Johnny Depp. That was in 2001, the vision of Michael Cimino but funding, the money men were not shown the envelope with the plot on it and faithlessly dropped away.
From that starry line up, tag line I propose - ‘When made in China was made’. But it brings out the salient feature of the book. All the elements of the conflict are there and not simply starry names dragged in to appeal to producers. There is the earnest assassin ‘Chinaman’ Ch’en, Kyo and Katov opposite numbers as foreign elements of the Communist Party, May Kyo’s German doctor wife, Hemmerlich a sympathiser, Ferrel the rich businessman doyen of the French Concession, Clappique comedian, scoundrel, poltroon. Oddly there are no Americans, at least not in the foreground of events though likely business interests were an invisible hand.
In rapid brisk scenes the dramatis personae are revealed to us. The cynical manipulation of the Comintern is well exposed as it was in reality. Chiang Kai-Shek wishes to get rid of the socialist element in his army and in Shanghai. Stalin wants to keep in with him. There may be a large omelette but such is historical necessity. Katov justifies it:
Katov listened in silence.
“That’s in the fut’re,” he said finally. “At present they’re killing our comrades. Yes. And yet, Kyo, I’m not sure I agree with you, you know. At the b’ginning of the Rev’lution, when I was still a socialist-rev’lutionary, we were all against Lenin’s tactics in Ukraine. Antonov, the comm’ssar down there, had arrested the mine-owners and had given them ten years of hard labor for sab’tage. Without trial. On his own authority as Comm’ssar of the Cheka Lenin congrat’lated him; we all pr’tested. They were real exploiters, y’know, the owners, and several of us had gone into the mines as convicts; that’s why we thought we should be p’rticularly fair with them, to give the example. However, if we had let them go, the prol’tariat would not have understood. Lenin was right. Justice was on our side, but Lenin was right. And we were also against the extr’ordinary powers of the Cheka. We’ve got to think carefully. The present slogan is good: extend the Rev’lution, and afterwards deepen it. Lenin didn’t say right away: ‘The whole power to the Soviets.’”
Later on Malraux developed the common ‘man of the left’ carapace which forgave Soviet reality as the necessary enemy of Fascism. The sense of truth and betrayal which characterise this book make it essential political fiction. There's a very true culminating scene - the financial report or what we can rescue from the debacle.
FERRAL, fanning himself with the newspaper in which the Consortium was being most violently attacked, was the last to arrive in the waiting-room of the Minister of Finance: in groups were waiting the vice-director of the Mouvement Général des Fonds—Ferral’s brother had wisely fallen ill the week before—the representative of the Bank of France, the representative of the principal French business-bank, and those of the credit establishments
