British Hard Cover
Edition
Hutchinson & Co 1975 |
On a
winter's day, some twenty years after the end of the Second
World War, a huge, smiling fat man wearing a black bowler
hat and a military greatcoat and known as Geraty walked
into a bar in the Bronx bearing his name and picked the
pocket of a young man named Quin, thereby setting in motion
a series of events that was to culminate in the largest
funeral procession held in Asia since the thirteenth century.
Quin was to embark on a journey to the East where he would
discover the truth about his parents and how they, together
with a pederastic Catholic priest, the one-eyed stoic
chief.of the Japanese secret police, and a Russian anarchist
turned sensualist (fluent in more than eighty languages,
confidant of Trotsky and Chou-En-Lai, an erudite translator
of Japanese pornography) succeeded in uncovering Japan's
military secrets and changing the course of the Second
World War.
In his quest, Quin
crosses paths with many incredible characters including
Mama, a prostitute who made love to 10,000 men before
she was 25, and Mama's brother, a man as evil as she
is good and employee of Kikuchi-Lotmann the world's
third most powerful gangster. Quin learns that it was
in the Shanghai of the 1930's that his origins and the
destinies of those he encounters first collided. There,
amid dazzling debauchery, opium rights to a province
had been lost at a game of cards, women given fortunes
in exchange for an evening of pleasure, and human depravity
practised on a hitherto unknown scale. There, too, the
Shanghai circus held its last grisly performance.Hypnotically written
and packed with invention, Quin's Shanghai Circus
has a profound sense of the Far East and forces us to
revaluate the relationship between Japan and the West.
A constantly shifting kaleidoscope of images and scenes,
the novel with its opium-dream plot
has been compared in America with The Alexandria Quartet.
Read
an excerpt here
".... a profoundly nutty book full of mysteries,
truths, untruths, idiot savants, necrophiliacs, magicians,
dwarfs, circus masters, secret agents, and a marvellous
recasting of history in our century"
- New York Times Book Review-Reviews of Quin's
Shanghai Circus:
Introduction
to Old Earth Books edition by John Nichols
Review
by Jeff Topham 2003
Review
by Jeff VanderMeer 2002
Review from New
York Times Book Review 1974
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