Thursday, January 9, 2020

THE READING RHEUM: THE HAND OF DR. FU MANCHU (1917)



While Karameneh is unquestionably the most significant female character in the first two Fu Manchu books, she takes a back seat in HAND to the daughter of Fu Manchu, even though the character is not named and only makes sporadic appearances in the story. Indeed, though Karameneh recovers her memory of Petrie and Smith near the end of the second book, in HAND Rohmer marginalizes her by packing her off to Egypt for her supposed safety. This provides no protection whatever, as the recrudescent Fu Manchu easily abducts her and uses her as a pawn against his enemies. Her signal accomplishment at the end of RETURN-- where she shoots her former master and almost kills him-- is nullified by a life-saving surgical operation, and though Fu evinces a desire for vengeance upon his erstwhile slave, he sets this aside in order to use her as a bargaining-chip with Petrie.

While RETURN pictures Fu Manchu becoming the world's emperor, in HAND the advent of Fah Lo Suee as a female ruler is foreshadowed by Nayland Smith. For the first time, he bestows a name upon Fu Manchu's network of spies and assassins, the Si-Fan. Though the name is said to refer commonly to a community in Tibet, Smith claims that it actually represents an organization that advocates the rule of the world by an empress. Smith's description of this legendary empress sounds quite a bit like Rider Haggard's "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed," in that this empress is said to be "incalculably ancient." To be sure, the empress renews herself through a "continuous series of reincarnations," and though Smith does not believe the legend literally, he suspects that Fu Manchu plans to manipulate the Si-Fan's desire for such a goddess-like figure by using his own daughter to that end.

Petrie meets the future Fah Lo Suee early in the novel, but has no idea as to her significance, since she creates the illusion that she's simply an ordinary servant-woman. In truth she's operating in London to help her ailing father obtain surgical help for the wound Karameneh dealt him, and Petrie finds himself and another surgeon forced to save the great enemy of the Western world, in part to save Karameneh's life. Fah does not appear in this scene, for Rohmer is focused on building up the uncanny mentality of the devil-doctor, who's able to coerce the doctors to do his will despite still having a bullet lodged in his skull.

Since Karameneh is largely passive in HAND, and Fu's daughter is usually offstage, Rohmwer makes up for the loss of resourceful women by introducing Zarmi, a Eurasian woman serving the devil-doctor's entourage. In contrast to Karameneh's feminine modesty, Zarmi is an ostentatious flirt, though she's entirely loyal to Fu's schemes. Since Fu is implicitly compared to the Satanic serpent from the Bible, Rohmer follows through by giving Zarmi an equally snaky aspect.

She was lithe as a serpent, graceful as a young panther, another Lamia come to damn the souls of men with those arts denounced in a long dead age by Apolloinus of Tyana.

Despite this mythic assocation, Zarmi remains a stock villain and nothing more. For several chapters, Rohmer puts aside menacing women and introduces a new subsidary male villain, the mandarin Ki-Ming. This worthy actually tries to convince Petrie that he represents a faction of the Si-Fan that has turned against Fu Manchu, but Smith places no faith in this claim. Sure enough, Ki-Ming only approaches Petrie in order to use Tibetan psychic practices-- which Rohmer refers to as "animal magnetism"-- in order to bewitch Petrie into killing Smith.

Petrie's second encounter with the future Fah takes place by sheer accident, when he boards a train and seeks a compartment. He ends up sharing one with the elegant daughter of his arch-enemy, though he never realizes that he's seen her before. He's unable to determine her national origins, and only later will Rohmer specify that Fah is half-Russian.

Finally, Petrie spies on a convocation of Orientals who are being invited to witness the advent of "the Lady of the Si-Fan," who is of course Fah masquerading as the legendary empress. Yet it's not until after this event-- wherein Fu buys his freedom from Petrie by giving up Karameneh-- that Rohmer specifies, over two-thirds of the way in the novel, that the Lady of the Si-Fan is Fu's daughter. Smith does not specify whether or not he's ever had any personal acquaintance with this personage. However, the same passage in which Petrie admits how he freed the master villain for the sake of love, Smith makes an oblique confession: "I understand, old man. That day came in my life long years ago."

The novel then winds up with the return of support-character Lionel Barton, the poor man's Richard Francis Burton, and once again, he serves the purpose of being the "Asianized European." (That said, Barton does utter the first racial slang-epithet to appear in the series, calling a minor character a "dago.") Barton also leads the intrepid heroes to Fu's current hideaway, which happens to be in a defunct devil-worship sanctuary, which in turn was built on the ruins of an ancient Phoenician site. This sequence is one of Rohmer's most suspenseful passages, and although Fu and Fah escape in a Chinese yacht, the novel concludes by implying that the wrath of heaven itself rises up against them. A massive storm wreaks havoc upon the seas near England, and the novel ends when Petrie and Smith behold some of the wreckage of the yacht, implying that once again the devil-doctor may have finally met his final fate.

And for nearly fourteen years, Fu remained dead. Ostensibly Rohmer brought back his Chinese villain simply because nothing the author wrote in the intervening years sold better than the doctor. The revival may have also stemmed from Hollywood's renewed interest in the character, beginning with THE MYSTERIOUS DOCTOR FU MANCHU in 1929. Though the film owed little to any of Rohmer's original work, it probably deserves some credit for encouraging the author to expand on his most memorable character, whose series would continue into the late 1950s.


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