THE READING RHEUM: THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1932)

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.