Quin's Shanghai Circus is a product of the 1970s, written by a man who had an amazing career as a military officer, CIA operative, and manager of a Greek newspaper, among other things. The language is lush, the imagery strange and compelling, the story intricate, and the characters complex.

I'm sorry to say that I didn't actually like it.

A young man named Quin, born in Japan and raised in the Bronx, meets a man named Geraty, who suggests to him that he can learn more about his long-dead parents if he escorts a simple-minded adult orphan, Big Gobi, to Japan. Big Gobi's original guardian and sponsor, Father Lamoureux, knew Quin's parents, and in gratitude for Gobi's return, might be prompted to talk about them. It seems Geraty also knew them, or knew of them, before and during World War II, but he claims to know almost nothing.

It seems a simple, if enormous, undertaking, but there's nothing particularly tying Quin to his current abode and employment. So off he and Big Gobi go, traveling on a freighter, returning to Japan where they were both born.

What follows is an intricate journey through prewar conspiracies, espionage, corruption, and mystery. Key figures are Quin's parents themselves, apparently involved in an espionage ring; a one-eyed general, head of the Japanese secret police, the Kempeitei; the general's lover, the prostitute, now madam, called Mama; Mama's sociopathic younger brother; a Russian former Trotskyite disillusioned with with Lenin's Russia became; Father Lamoureux himself; and the General's brother, a Japanese baron whose title and lands passed to the General when he converted to Judaism and became Rabbi Lottman. Each witness tells a story that twists the previous one into strange and unrecognizable shapes, raising a a dozen questions for every real answer Quin gets.

It's a revealing and often dark look at Japan before and during the war, and includes a shockingly brutal account of the Japanese army's atrocities during the Rape of Nanking. Along with the brutality and grotesqueries, though, there is humor, humanity, and compassion.

I didn't like this book, but it is, nevertheless, a good book. It's a glimpse into another world, both the world of the book and the world in which it was written. It's not to my taste, but it is interesting and very well done.

Recommended with reservations; it's not for younger readers or very sensitive readers. Very much an adult read.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

Originally published in the 70s, Whittemore's works have been brought back into print by Old Earth Press, and I'm mighty glad they did. This is a huge, sprawling thicket of a novel, with action, espionage, atrocities, prostitution, pornography, and the oddest cast of characters you'll ever likely run across. Although the story is confusing at first, with each chapter you gain a new layer of understanding. By the end, Whittemore had left me breathless. ( )

A tremenously crazy and unpredictable book. It's "over the top" most of the time, but in a good way. Whittemore's closest relative author-wise might be considered Tom Robbins, but his voice is quite unique. Just when you think he's just being funny, you realize he's in deadly earnest. Whittemore is a sadly neglected author. ( )

There are two things you need to know about this novel.

It has no quotation marks.

It’s a spy’s novel, specifically a spy with a sense of drama.

And that’s what Whittemore was: an ex-CIA case officer who took up being a novelist.

The lack of quotation marks are a sign of the spy. Dialogue and personal statements aren’t any more privileged and accurate source of information than documents and personal observations. Sources lie, they misremember, they self-aggrandize, conveniently forget, or are double agents.

The drama comes in with Whittemore’s heavy use of foreshadowing, telling us what his characters don’t know, zooming back into history at the switch of a paragraph – to the Mongols, the late 19th century, and World War Two.

The plot starts with a mystery of motive and relationship. A clownish, fat man, given to constantly daubing horseradish under his nose, tries to get a massive collection of Japanese porn past the somewhat censorious U.S. customs officers of 1965. Failing that, he shows up at a bar, which just happens to share his last name, and tells a story to bartender Quin.

And, thus, we set off on a quest which is mostly about the revelation of hidden family relations, in turn tangled up with a Soviet intelligence operation in wartime Japan seemingly inspired, loosely, by Richard Sorge’s and Hozumi Ozaki’s activities.

Through it all we get misinterpretations, misunderstandings, deceptions and conceptions and a deceptive conception perpetrated by a priest of eidetic memory, a sadistic policeman, a whore of 10,000 customers, that fat man peddling fake pornographic movies, a Russian anarchist, a Kempeitai officer, an international mobster, a Japanese rabbi, and a not so innocent retarded man. And then there’s Quin’s father, proprietor of a circus of debauchery in Shanghai.

Grotesqueries and dark farces abound: the anus as dead drop; the image of Japanese prostitutes nullifying the influence of the foreign sailors swarming ashore at Japanese ports; a picnic of four gas-masked figures on a Japanese beach; the fat man magically echoing, at novel’s end, and the journey of the legendary monk Nichiren (predictor of the kamikaze that saved Japan from the Mongols).

And the real grotesquerie at the center is a three page, detailed listing of atrocities committed during the Japanese rape of Nanking during World War Two.

It’s a readable book, bizarre in its incidents. Those who like puzzles might enjoy figuring out the sexual and genetic relationships of the characters. It is part of one of the novel’s themes, the complexity of relationships. Other of Whittemore’s concerns, both very spyish, is understanding the order behind history’s chaos and how we can never be totally sure of each other’s past.

But it’s a book that, for me, fades from memory. Despite other’s claims that it is a secret history, it pales in presentation – if not colorful detail and setting – to others like Jake Arnott’s A House of Rumour or the fantastical secret histories of Tim Powers. It may indeed be a story of redemption for the fat man or a statement that history is fantasy, but, for me, it was a travelogue of curiosities and not empathetic engagement.

Even the rape of Nanking and the apocalyptic finale of Quin’s circus left me noting incidents and feeling little. I suppose, in the end, I approached a spy’s novel like a certain kind of spy – just passing through, noting the details, and not feeling much for the locals. ( )

A strange and memorable book. A series of haunting puzzle pieces--some beautiful, some brutal, most of them sad--told in a lucid, readable prose style far clearer than the story it relates. If I read this book again, I will start making a diagram at the beginning showing how all the characters and incidents connect to each other. I'm sure I missed a lot - but I'm not completely sure I want to go on this ride again. ( )