Interminably long, though fascinating, and obsessively over-detailed 3.5 rating

Reading this felt a little like having over-indulged on something a bit indigestible. The problem with a fiction on the life of Empress Dowager Ci’Xi, a young woman who became a lower ranking concubine, then elevated, as she was the mother of the only son of the reigning Manchu Emperor, is, first of all the secrecy of the complicated Manchu Court and dynasty, and, secondly, Ci’Xi’s longevity in power and influence, during a time of great change.

Born in 1935, and dying in 1908, Ci’Xi was anyway unusual in that she was a woman. Women did not have influence in this way. Her reputation is hugely conflictual, comprising both despotism, profligacy and also, reformist, and moderate. In some ways, both vilified and hagiographied

She has been both vilified and admired. Some later feminist historians have examined some of the darkest claims against her in the light of misogyny.

Pear S. Buck, an American author, deeply loving China, where she lived for some years, was a Pulitzer prize winning novelist with The Good Earth, and also won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her compassionate writing about the life of the peasantry in China, and her account of the life of her missionary parents.

This particular book though is different, a fictionalised biography of the most powerful. Buck gives us a wealth of detail about the sumptuous structure and complicated life within the Royal household. Very very sumptuous, very very detailed. Herein is the problem. How to balance the detail which gives authenticity and rooting in time and place, with narrative and story, as well as explain the extraordinary complexity of global events and how the little known (in the West) world of 19th and early 20th century China, clashes with the era of Western modernisation, during the height of Empire building and Industrial Revolution.

There was much to be absorbed in here, despite needing to skim read a lot. There were many times I was on the verge of giving up, exhausted at the description of yet another banquet, frock, or volatile meeting with this or that Prince, Adviser or Eunuch engaged in devious machinations to seize or maintain power.

That I continued makes 3.5 star the rating which seems fairest. I couldn’t quite stretch to 4 star, so the drop to the ‘okay’ rating – though it is, for sure, better than that.