The bookpacking journey visits China, where Chief Inspector Chen of the Shanghai Police is in retrospective mood. He has been told his state medical insurance no longer covers the nursing home fees for his mother. She needs care but instead of moving in with her son, she insists on returning to her own tiny apartment. That puts Chen in the cramped attic bedroom of his childhood, prompting a night interrupted by dreams that both echo his life and reflect his current insecurities. He worries that the cancelled insurance is a first sign of political disfavour.
As he wakes from successive dreams, he recalls key incidents in his education and career that led to his appointment in the police service and his rapid promotion to inspector. This was despite his ‘black’ family background due to his father, a Confucian scholar, being labelled and persecuted as a bourgeois intellectual and class enemy during the cultural revolution of the 1960s.
The incidents illustrate that Chen’s talent for investigation started early but had to be combined with carefully treading the minefield of political correctness, that correctness forever changing over the decades as the Party continually reformed and reset the rules.
The criminal detection element takes second place to the historical context in this, the eleventh book of the Inspector Chen series, though one early case provides a meaty chunk in the middle. The Shanghai setting, particularly the Red Dust Lane community, is atmospheric and the impact of unfolding politics on such individuals is interesting enough to sustain attention over the two hundred pages.
A reader more
familiar with the series may get more from this delve into the character’s
development than I did. Am I tempted to pick up an earlier volume, more
representative of the series? Maybe, but not any time soon.
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