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Even for me--a longtime reader of works of revolutionary politics and political science--this novel was cumbersome to absorb. To place it among the more stalwart literature I've already read concerning the Chinese Civil War, is a reluctant action on my part.

I'm forced to designate it one of the more poorly-written 'great books' of this type, which has come my way so far. I'm at a loss to explain why the book has remained so highly-regarded for so long. It routinely appears on lists of fine novels; yet the clearly talented author commits some of the worst blunders found in the worst novels in this entire sub-genre.

Chief flaw: it is an extremely 'talky' book. 'Talky' to the point where his characters do not even matter so long as the author gets the ideas which excite him, down on paper, unconvincingly emitted from their mouths. They are mouthpieces only.

We've all seen this symptom exhibited in other books but here the disease is at its most manifest. Everyone in the book jabbers political theory, well beyond the point where it is even sensible.

Does all this gibberish help give the reader a glimpse of the frantic events leading to the Revolution? No. Although the characters yammer on just as much about factions and street battles, alliances and army movements as they do Theory, there's similarly no coherence there either. The book does not make sense of the background events it is supposed to depict.

What's left? Well, the exotic cast of characters and their actions ...which ordinarily would likely make a cracking read. There's hints of competent, nuts'n'bolts storytelling remaining in little islands dotting the course of the narrative. I found a few passages of pure action which were fairly riveting: stealing munitions off a cargo ship, storming a police station; a bomb attack on Chiang Kai-Shek.

The lead figure in these episodes is a mentally-troubled but impassioned rebel Ch'en, and his fury gives the book most of its liveliness (where every other character is a mynah bird). Ch'en has the most to do; but gets killed 3/4 of the way along; (thematically unsatisfying) ...and that thrusts us back among the parrots.

It truly reaches almost comical proportions, the amount of speechifying all these figures engage in. Even when dashing about pell-mell, running for their lives, evacuating the city, Malraux's rebels will breathlessly scurry into a safe-house, only steps ahead of pursuers, nonetheless enjoy time to engage in revolutionary dialectics. Absurd.

The other prominent figure in the story is a French diplomat Farrar, who (incredibly) at the height of the street fighting, remains obsessed with his mistresses. This is the other leading 'topic' Malraux exhausts: romance and l'amour. Sorely trying to this reader's patience.

Again, the sheer wordiness. Farrar's interludes with the sultry V. are dominated by and mental introspection. This couple talks about theories of love more than they make love! They even write tedious letters to each other about the politics of gender and the ethics of coupling. On and on and on, more talk, more words, more speeches.

Whatever it is all intended to amount to, I'm sure I can't say. Maybe the novel improves upon re-reading or in discussion groups. Maybe this novel was hotly debated by lovers and intellectuals among little tables along the Left Bank of the Seine in its day.

I suppose I'm glad I read it, but the pleasure is desultory--I am more relieved to have done with it; and I'm taking very little away with me from the experience.

There's one hilarious chapter where the pompous Farrar is made-a-fool-of by V. in a hotel lobby--to humiliate him, she arranges that he and another of her bed partners to run into each other at the same hour--that was one fun moment in an otherwise tepid, lukewarm book. It gave me a "frissonde of excitement, the evanescence of which lingered in my thoughts as I went about my morning toilette" ...as Malraux might say.