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Overview
Escaping a ship's mutiny with his stowaway daughter Rosamund, seventeenth century horticulturalist Edward Popple is cast ashore on an uncharted island in the Indian Ocean. The island, with its sands, rock pools, and solitaire birds, seems to Edward to be a paradisal laboratory. There he can concentrate on scientific discovery and breeding the elusive black rose, as well as have his daughter, whom he adores seemingly beyond the proper boundaries of a father, to himself. But they soon discover the island has other refugees: namely Lou-Lu, a Chinese eunuch, marooned on a mission to Rome with his charge Taizao, an impotent princeling and claimant to the throne of China. They have a rare yellow rose and a ship, and negotiations begin: the Chinese need the Europeans' navigational skills, and desire Popple's daughter, and Popple needs the ship and desires the rose of the Chinese.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
East and West meet on an undiscovered island in the Indian Ocean in this lush, fatalistic second novel (after The Avenue of Eternal Peace) from Jose, an Australian. Off the African coast, a shipwreck strands English horticulturist Edward Popple, his daughter, Rosamund, and a sailor. Unbeknownst to them, the island harbors other refugees: Taizao, a seemingly impotent exiled Chinese prince; Lou Lu, an elderly eunuch who serves as Taizao's guardian; and the crew of their Chinese ship. After some initial misunderstandings, the two groups join forces to try to escape the island. From the start, it's clear that this isn't a standard historical adventure. The prose is ripe, laden with a sense of the forbidden, and with doom. Popple craves his daughter, noting how, while on horseback, "hot rosy pulses from the riding flushed her skin." When Rosamund awakens the prince's sexuality, it's by urinating in front of him. And when the narrative darkens into suffering and tragedy, it's jarring but no surprise, like a thunderstorm at the end of a hot and humid day. (June)Brad Hooper
Two worlds meeting face to face in a small place is the thematic framework of a luminous historical novel by an obviously talented Australian. In mid-seventeenth-century England, the king has been beheaded and the puritanical Oliver Cromwell rules in his place. In these unsettled times, horticulturist Edward Popple finds it increasingly difficult to secure a living for his family; to that end, he takes on the assignment of ship doctor on a voyage of discovery sponsored by the Royal Society of Fellows. Edward's beloved daughter, toward whom he harbors an unnatural attraction, stows away. After a mutinous uprising, they find themselves ashore on an island in the Indian Ocean. Also waylaid on that forsaken place is the young pretender to the imperial throne of China and his chief eunuch, on their way to Rome to appeal to the pope for aid in restoring the prince to his rightful status. Eastern and Western cultures eye each other covetously: the Chinese want the Englishman's navigational savvy and his daughter as a consort for the prince, the Englishman wants the yellow rose the Chinese have carried with them to use in his horticultural experimentation. The smoothly shaped, historically authentic story supports characters perfectly evocative of their time yet meaningfully reverberant in ours.Kirkus Reviews
A fable, set in the 17th century, filled with vivid evocations of another time, wonderfully peculiar characters, and driven by a rather chilly vision of fate.Jose (Avenue of Eternal Peace, 1991) has an ingenious idea. Edward Popple, a British scientist scornful of his foppish colleagues and uncomfortable in Puritan England, takes a berth as ship's doctor on an expedition to see the Indian Ocean. His daughter Rosamund, a young woman frustrated by the stifling conventions of her class and time, becomes a stowaway on her father's ship. Then a mutiny leads to their abandonment on a small but overwhelmingly fertile island in the East, their only companions birds and sea turtles. Popple falls to the study of his new world with zest, while Rosamund samples her newfound independence, roaming the island, indulging in romantic fantasies. The only unsettling element is Popple's increasingly incestuous interest in his daughter. Their fraying idyll is ended, though, by the arrival of a Chinese junk, carrying an elderly eunuch, an advisor to the just-deposed Ming dynasty of China, and the last male heir to the Ming line, an indolent and seemingly impotent young man. Popple and Lou Lo, the eunuch, carry on lengthy debates in Latin. Meanwhile, Taizao, the heir, finds himself attracted to blond, zestful Rosamund, and after some truly peculiar foreplay, the two consummate their affair. For much of the novel, Jose's dense knowledge of 17th-century science and political theory, of horticulture and of the period's somber religious beliefs, drives the book along, gives it conviction and startling vigor. But the story turns increasingly grim; by the close, a series of nasty plots and betrayals feel as if they've been forced onto the narrative rather than drawn from it.
Jose's evocation of his island, and of the conflicting worldviews of two utterly different civilizations in collision, is rich, often witty, and startling. He fumbles only in imposing too abrupt and mechanical an end on his odd, engaging characters.