Sophie Fern reviews A Most Immoral Woman.
Linda Jaivin
Fourth Estate, $34.99, pbk
A Most Immoral Woman is based on a true story and tells of the Russo-Japanese War that was fought in China - but this is a side story compared to that of the ongoing affair between the great G. E. Morrison, China correspondent for The Times of London, and Mae Ruth Perkins, the daughter of a senator from San Francisco.
It is three weeks after the start of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and Morrison is bored. He has been ordered by his London-based editor to stay in Peking and co-ordinate the war correspondents.
As Morrison had just written to this same editor with a long list of his ailments, he wasn't surprised by the order but this didn't make the blow of age and infirmity any easier to bear.
He arrives in Newchang, a little closer to the front, to pick up gossip from the Russians stationed there. But instead of finding information he meets Mae at a hotel and is immediately taken in by her beauty and charm.
They go for a walk together after supper and end up in bed together. Morrison feels that he has finally met the woman of his dreams, but for Mae he is just another man.
Against the backdrop of the war and various cities and treaty ports in which Morrison and Mae meet, he slowly learns that the only person to whom Mae is true is herself, and that she can be painfully truthful about her past and present lovers.
Meanwhile, a colleague of Morrison's by the name of James is trying to get a telegraph ship into the battle area so that he can send reports back to London.
Of course these will be censored by both sides but James is determined this will succeed and asks for Morrison to use his influence.
With the Russians, Japanese, Chinese and British all having different agendas it would have been an impossible diplomatic task for Morrison to perform, even if his mind wasn't always on Mae and who she might be in bed with at that particular moment.
I was more interested in the political situation than in the affair, which I was sure was doomed from the word go, and therefore this wasn't the book for me.
But if you like your history sweetened with a bit of romance, this is a novel that you will really enjoy.
- Sophie Fern is a teaching fellow at Otago University.
