Fire From The Sun

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Fire from the Sun novel is a romantic and historical epic painted on a very broad canvas. There are 76 chapters altogether. Each chapter is “set up” with an epigrammatic couplet, in the style of old Chinese novels. There is also a brief postscript , and a glossary of operatic terms.

The novel follows the fortunes of two people, William Leung and Margaret Han, from the mid-1960s through to the early 1990s. They are childhood friends in a small town in southwestern China. Then the Great Cultural Revolution divides them and they follow separate paths to success in the Western world: William as a Wall Street tycoon and Margaret as a singer of Italian opera.

The background of the story is recent Chinese history, bracketed by two great upheavals: the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and the student movement of 1989. Ten chapters are given over to the latter, based on much reading, research, and personal testimony about events in and around Tiananmen Square.

The book’s action ranges all over China, from the lush valleys of the southwest to the frozen plains of Manchuria, from the garrison settlements of occupied Tibet to elite apartments in Beijing, from the easy-going corruption of 1970s Hong Kong to the wakening bustle of post-Mao Shanghai. It then moves on to the international opera circuit, the boardrooms of Wall Street, and the habitations of the rich in Manhattan and Long Island’s East End.

Some actual celebrities have walk-on parts in the book: Bruce Lee, Richard Nixon, the Prince of Wales. Some others are presented under disguises of varying depth: Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Barbra Streisand, Rudy Giuliani, and some that only close followers of opera or 1980s Wall Street affairs will recognize.

Fire from the Sun is a plain third-person narrative, not adventurous in technique. My aim has been just to tell a story — a realistic, interesting, and, I hope, occasionally moving story. If the presentation is in any way unusual, that is because of influences from Chinese literature. There is a certain detachment, a certain distance between the omniscient narrator and the inhabitants of the book, as there is in classic Chinese novels like Red Chamber Dream or Journey to the West, or in much medieval Chinese poetry, especially Wang Wei’s and Po Chü-I’s. A fair quantity of Chinese folklore, verse, idiom, and literary allusion is included, always in context and in translation.

The great Chinese authors, and many of the poets, wrote from a standpoint of Buddhist other-worldliness. Fire from the Sun doesn’t have exactly that sensibility, only a little more distance between narrator and characters than is usual. I am not a Buddhist; but one of my characters is, and the heroine is headed in the same direction by the book’s end.