In Review

21 November 2008 20:48 BST

Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang

Published by Penguin, out now, paperback, 161, £7.99.

In a nutshell…

Sexy espionage in the city

What's it all about?

Set in 1950s Shanghai and translated from Chinese by Julia Lovell, the eponymous Lust, Caution leads a selection of short stories by Eileen Chang.

With the main story recently turned into a Hollywood film by Ang Lee, the literary world has been reawakened to the talents of Chang.

As well as Lust, Caution, which tells the tale of an ill-fated undercover spy mission, the collection also contains four other Shanghai sorties including bittersweet kitchen sink dramas In The Waiting Room and Steamed Osmanthus Flower.

Lust, Caution is the story of young female activist, Jiazghi, who inadvertently falls for her prey, the middle-aged Mr Yi.

In the Steamed Osmanthus Flower, a put-upon maid spends her life trapped between serving her western employer, providing for her son and shunning the advances of her husband against the backdrop of a wet and oppressively hot Shanghai.

The characters sat in the waiting room of the eponymous story wait in stasis for their massage appointments as lives intertwine among political uncertainty and domestic unrest.

Who's it by?

Born in 1920, Eileen Change has been dubbed the "fallen angel of Chinese literature" by filmmaker Ang Lee. The daughter of an aristocratic Shanghai family, the young Eileen fled an unhappy childhood to study literature at the University of Hong Kong.

A prolific academic career at Berkley University followed the publication of two novels in the 1950s. The Rice Sprout and Naked Earth received critical praise and were lauded by the US authorities for their anti-Communist stance. Her earlier work, produced during the Japanese occupation – Romances and Written on Water – was well received in her homeland and underscored her reputation as the country's premier literature lady.

Incidentally, Lust, Caution took Chang over 20 years to complete - work began on the story in the 1950s, but the tale of adultery and espionage went unpublished until 1979.

As an example…

"She glanced at her watch again. She felt a kind of chilling premonition of failure, like a long snag in a silk stocking, silently creeping up her body."

Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster

The main short story has already been given an overhaul by Ang Lee and the other stories in the collection could make equally as good fodder for the big screen. In the same way two Annie Proulx stories (Brokeback Mountain and The Shipping News) have been made in to blockbusters, there is scope for more of Chang's offerings to be given the Hollywood treatment.

What the others say

"A giant of modern Chinese literature." - New York Times

"Lust, Caution is one of Chang's most explicit, unsettling articulations of her views on the relationship between tidy political abstraction and irrational emotional reality - on the ultimate ascendancy of the latter over the former." - Guardian

So is it any good?

The Sex and the City-esque cover photo for Lust, Caution and the much-hyped sex scenes in Ang Lee's film overshadow the brilliance of Eileen Chang's writing. This is not erotic espionage, but an interesting exploration of the insular world of femininity during a time when the Eastern world was experiencing one of its biggest challenges.

What Chang has managed to capture in all the stories included in Lust, Caution is the send of Shanghai in emotional turmoil. It'd be more than a little cliched to compare the main female characters to the city itself, but this is one way of considering the subtle relationship the protagonists have to the wet, overpowering place on the edge.

Comparisons between the damp, murky spy world of Lust, Caution's Shanghai with the London described by Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent spring to mind. The characters slip and slope from artificial domesticity to backstreet cafes and clandestine phone calls, as the metropolis lives and breathes in the distance.

The inconclusive - and ultimately abrupt - ending of Lust, Caution is frustrating at first, but on a second reading is a fitting end to any short story. Jiazghi is an actress, a spy and a rebel – any kind of concrete closure would undermine her rash decision to betray her fellow activists and the story effectively ends when she silently and softly confesses to Mr Yi. This split-second scene is the ending and although many have sneered at the petering out of the story – I'm going to compare Mr Yi driving off in the rain to the end of Polanski's Chinatown: "Forget it, it's Shanghai".

It's a real shame that Chang missed out on a place in the Chinese canon and it's a complete disservice to her talent, and her ability to capture the essence of an imperative time in modern-day history, that she is not included on more university reading lists.

8/10

Rebecca Amir