After a brief spell of non-fiction I have gone back to fiction. Ironically, the story is connected with Shanghai – last blog but one and the Bolsheviks feature prominently again – last blog. So my reading is continuing along the same themes. This novel is very readable but it sometimes lacks detail. It is a modern novel, first published in 2004. It is rather swashbuckling and romantic. It rather reminds me of the work of Wilbur Smith who’s writing, I decided, is not for me. I might once have been entertained by that sort of stuff. But not now. The characters are larger than life. They are hardly credible as human beings. They are white Russians escaping the Bolsheviks to begin a new life in Shanghai as thousands did at the time of the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks had executed the Csar and his children so there could be no return to the old regime. However, an interesting point is made in a conversation. While the old Csarist regime was oppressive, serfdom was abolished in Russia long before slavery was abolished in the United States. I sometimes wonder why I waste my time reading silly stories about things that never happened. Only this morning there was an article on the radio about the Da Vinci Code. Could it be a case of Harry Potter for adults? At least what Harry Potter has done for children is to get them away from television and computer games and get them to read. This enhances their ability to use the language, their spelling and their grammatical construction. It is of enormous value to children. However, I met a gentleman in Amsterdam whose career is in books and I asked him if he had read Harry Potter. He said that he had not. It was not for him. I tried to read Harry Potter but I found it is not for me either. The author’s interest in Shanghai seems to arise from his parent’s visit on their round-the world honeymoon in 1932. However, the author visited Shanghai in 2002 to research material for the book. He also worked in Hong Kong in the 1960’s. I suppose it could be said that Hong Kong came to fulfil the role that Shanghai once had. My own interest in Shanghai arises from my uncle who worked there as a policeman in the International Settlement. The Russian connection comes from the fact that on one of his return voyages to Shanghai after a period of home leave, he met and married a Russian princess. Obviously, she was a White Russian who had escaped the Bolshevik Revolution. There were many Russian princesses who escaped the Revolution and called themselves princesses to create a bit of status for their new surroundings. However, on arriving in Shanghai, my uncle found that he had acquired a ready-made family consisting of twin twenty-one year old daughters. Sadly, on a subsequent home leave, my uncle underwent a minor operation which went wrong and he died. More recently, on my own home leave, I was shown an old album containing a photograph taken in China of a couple standing beside an old motor car; the lady was in a fur coat and the gentleman was in some kind of uniform.