French perspective on Chinese Communist uprising
The novel revolves around a Communist uprising that took place in Shanghai in 1927, known as the Shanghai Massacre or the April 12 Purge. Several men among the book’s international cast of characters are involved in a Communist cell secretly plotting a revolt against the ruling Chinese nationalist party, known as the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. The conspirators hope to gain control of Shanghai before the arrival of a train loaded with Kuomintang forces and headed their way. As the novel opens, Chen, a Communist terrorist, is murdering a government official. He later sets his sights on assassinating Chiang Kai-shek himself. While there are a few scenes of violence and brutality, most of the narrative consists of back room meetings in shops, nightclubs, and opium dens, where the Communists hide, plot, and commiserate. The cast also includes a few French businessmen who represent the commercial interests that France had in China at the time. To further their business ventures, the French support Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, and Malraux is critical of this capitalist colonialism on the part of his native land.
This novel is pro-Communist and to some extent romanticizes terrorism. I don’t have a problem with that. I just don’t like the way the story is told. Malraux seems to have gone to the Joseph Conrad school of approaching everything from an oblique angle, dwelling on insignificant details at the expense of plot, and never giving the reader enough information to understand what’s going on. There is an ostentatious artiness to the prose that comes across as pretentious. It also comes across, for the most part, as more boring than this story should be. I found this period in history and the conflict depicted interesting, but Malraux writes as if he wants to obscure the details from readers who aren’t already in the know. When there are life-and-death events taking place in the story, he chooses to concentrate on the characters’ facial expressions, interior monologues, or quirky eccentricities rather than the vital matters at hand. That’s unfortunate, because there are a few chapters here that are really quite moving (in particular one involving political prisoners). I would have liked this novel better, however, if it had been written by a naturalist writer (like Emile Zola), a proletarian realist (André Stil), or even a neo-Romanticist (Boris Pasternak). In any of those cases, the reader would have gotten more social realism and less navel-gazing modernism.
Man’s Fate will probably appeal mostly to those with an interest in Communist history or leftist literature. If you don’t know much about the 1927 clash between the Communists and the Kuomintang, however, you’re not going to learn a whole lot here. Perhaps because Malraux wants to present his narrative as an insider’s view, he writes the novel as if the reader is already intimately familiar with these events. As far as the broader “human condition” is concerned, Malraux includes many scenes of characters dealing with existential angst. If you’re not in a position of killing or being killed, however, it is difficult to see how their inner turmoil and personal dilemmas are applicable to the non-revolutionary life.
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