Review: Wallet of Kai Lung

Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Amusingly told tales, some fantastical but most not, set in a version of China that is part what Westerners of the time imagined China to be like and part sly satire. A number of the "wise traditional sayings" are cliched English phrases like "having a skeleton in the closet" paraphrased into the overly formal and elaborate diction that is used throughout, and quotations from a famous Chinese writer are similarly paraphrased Shakespeare, which leads me to suspect that a lot of the satire is actually about England, not China at all. In other words, this book's relationship to China is approximately that of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado to Japan, though the pastiche is a touch more sophisticated and the names are not obvious jokes.

The framing device for all but a couple of the stories is that they're being told by the professional storyteller Kai Lung, and parts of the frame are amusing too. The stories vary, but are mostly about deserving people ending up on top against conniving and corrupt rivals. Some of these are young men, others are middle-aged men; I don't recall a story with a female protagonist, and the women, while occasionally contributing intelligently to the resolution, are mostly prizes to be won or obstacles to overcome.

That overly formal diction is a bit of a trial at times, and some of the longer sentences take some parsing. I enjoyed it enough that I would read others in the series, but I'm not going to rush out and do it straight away.

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