Avenue of Eternal Peace: 2 - Hardcover

Author Jose ( Papers Nautilus ), who is also the cultural counselor at the Australian embassy in Beijing, offers up a portrait of a late-'80s China as enigmatic as it is frenetic, where life is ruled by irony and riddles. Wally Frith is an Australian oncologist whose wife has recently died of cancer; grieving and feeling mocked by his own professional concerns, Wally arranges a stint at the Peking Union Medical College, the most Western of China's medical centers, with hopes of meeting professor Hsu Chien Lung, who years before had performed revolutionary cancer research. Discovering a glittering expatriate circle, socializing with natives and enamored of a beautiful and intelligent local woman, Wally develops a taste for such Chinese puzzles as qigong , "the breathing power." His curiosity thus educated, Wally is slowly prepared to unravel the mysteries woven by his Peking Union colleagues concerning Hsu's whereabouts. If Jose's prose is intermittently cloying ("Their bodies were coated in silver scales of moonshine") and his narrative somewhat overdetermined, his panoramic grasp of his subject more than compensates. A weighted silence envelops the subject of the Tiananmen Square massacres; although the bloody events are yet to occur as this novel ends, they loom throughout as a final irony, for the Avenue of Eternal Peace leads into the infamous square.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cancer researcher Wally Frith journeys from his native Australia to China, where he hopes to meet another specialist who did innovative work in the 1930s. But Wally also has more personal reasons for traveling. He wants to visit the country where his missionary grandparents once lived, and he needs to escape from a home suffused with memories of his late wife. Although Wally is the focus, many characters both Chinese and Western populate this novel. The author's knowledge of China and its people provides a glimpse of Oriental life. At the same time his deft characterizations demonstrate dramatically the everyday joys and struggles that all people share. The growing discontent of young students with corrupt government leaders forms the background for the story, which ends shortly before the terrible events of Tiananmen Square. This is Jose's third novel, and the first to be published in the United States.
- Patricia Altner, U.S. Dept. of Defense Lib., Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.