The
title of Sax Rohmer’s fifth “Fu Manchu” book has garnered some
fame thanks to the Boris Karloff adaptation. The book itself is not
one of the author’s more outstanding books in the series, however,
being very close to being a potboiler.
MASK
uses most of the same cast from DAUGHTER. Again the viewpoint
character is the extremely dull Shan Greville, and again he’s
brought into the world of Oriental crime through his ties with his
employer, archaeologist Lionel Barton, and Barton’s niece Rima
(still Greville’s romantic interest, whom he marries at the book’s
conclusion). In DAUGHTER one of Barton’s discoveries incited the
interests of Fu Manchu, and MASK follows the same pattern. This time
Barton starts out in Persia, where he unearths several
relics—including the titular mask—belonging to El Mokanna, the
long-dead leader of an Islamic revolutionary cult. Fu Mancnu seeks to
obtain the relics in order to create the illusion of a recrudescent
El Mokanna, one able to stir all the hordes of Islam to rise up
against the West.
Also
back from the previous novel is Fu Manchu’s daughter. The previous
novel showed Fah Lo Suee making a gambit to take over the Si-Fan from
her aging father. In MASK father and daughter seem reconciled, though
in a conversation with Greville, Fu mentions that he had to purchase
his daughter’s aid with an inducement; that of allowing her to
pursue her ardor for Greville. Given that Fah is as much a master of
mind-altering drugs as her father, she has little trouble in bending
the rather passive protagonist to her will. Rohmer keeps everything
between the two of them G-rated on the surface, but probably even in
the thirties no reader believed that she and the doped Greville
exchanged nothing beyond kisses. Fah gets almost as many good lines
in the novel as her august progenitor, and indeed the other British
characters in the novel are not even close to being as interesting
than the Asian mastermind and his quixotic daughter. (Even after his
defeat by Nayland Smith and Barton, Fu is magnanimous enough to send
Greville and Rima a very expensive wedding present.)
Greville
also plays a role in Fu’s plan to gain the relics from Barton, but
the main action of the novel becomes repetitive, almost verging on a
game of “relics, relics, who’s got the relics.” When Fu
captures Rima in order to blackmail Barton into giving up the El
Mokannna treasures, Barton—repeatedly portrayed as an egotistical
man-child—switches the originals with forgeries. On one hand,
Barton’s gambit foils the plans of the devil-doctor, as it’s
implied that the Mokanna plot fails when Fu can’t produce the real
artifacts to impress certain “learned Moslems.” On the other,
Greville and Nayland Smith are never comfortable with Barton’s
chicanery, given that he, a Briton, shows less of a sense of honor
than the Chinese villain.
Clearly
Rohmer chose to recycle a concept suggested in both the third and
fourth books, wherein some charismatic figure—both times, one that
would’ve been impersonated by Fah Lo Suee—was set up to incite
massive revolts in the East. In MASK Rohmer very loosely models his
fictional “El Mokanna” character on the historical Islamic figure
known as “the Mahdi.” Not surprisingly, Rohmer has no interest in
how El Mokanna’s uprising might work in the real world, or how it
would work to the benefit of Fu Manchu. “The rising of the East”
belongs to the world of sociological myth, existing purely to speak
to the anxities of colonial Europe. Fu Manchu had his origins in
similar anxieties, specifically spawned by the Boxer Rebellion. Yet,
once Rohmer settled into the demands of writing regular installments
in the devil-doctor’s career of crime, the author became
increasingly less interested in the idea of some vague Asiatic
menace, and began showing Fu more as a master of intrigue and
espionage.
Aside
from some of the usual tricks with drugs and mindreading, Fu Manchu
doesn’t display much of his signature inventiveness. He shows
Greville a chemical that can make steel as brittle as chocolate, but
though this resource is used in a later chapter, it’s not overly
memorable. The novel’s most significant moment is Fu’s revelation
that he’s at last found an “elixir of youth,” Since Fu is last
seen in DAUGHTER as an infirm old man, Rohmer may have consciously
realized that his villain no longer cut an impressive figure, and
that as the writer he had to give Fu a literal immortality,
anticipating the immortality Fu would enjoy in popular fiction. At
this point in the series, Fah Lo Suee, said to be about thirty, has
not yet partaken of the elixir herself. But even without immortality,
she seems far less comfortable with her superhuman status than her
magisterial father.
No comments:
Post a Comment