Publication date: February 5, 2003 $24.95 FPT 458 pages   

ISBN: 0-446-53097-2. ...

Flash!

The Iceman has just finished a new novel by Aimee Liu.

Flash!

The novel is Flash House. The Iceman began the novel with a fifth of his favorite single malt. He is happy to report that he successfully negotiated the novel and the Scotch in the hours between midnight and dawn.

As the morning flashes through the raised eyebrow of a broken Venetian blind, the Iceman remembers that the flash of the novel arose in a rising sun far flung from that, which illuminated its fabled New Orleans sister. The house in Flash House is an Indian brothel circa 1949. The players are Americans, Indians, British, Chinese and Russian. The game is a tournament of shadows also known as "The Great Game" played by the powers jostling for position in the Far East at the beginning of the Cold War. By the end of the novel we will come to believe it a metaphor for the Cold War presently seeking the heat now frozen along our current axis of evil. McCarthyism is revisited. It sounds little different than the Bushism's that presently crowd the airways. The degradation of the Flash House is also that of nations. Then as now, the world goes a little mad when its moral prerogatives are believed absolute.

The Iceman's hangover is minor to middling. His believes the true depth of his intoxication is consequent of imbibing Ms. Liu's narrative in a single sitting. Flash House is a page-turner, a corker, a splendid jewel found nestled among the Cracker Jacks.

The book is 458 pages, ostensibly comprised of 15 chapters divided into Books 1 and 2, spanning 22 months from March 1949 to December 1950. Closer scrutiny reveals a density of 83 subchapters, a Prologue and an Epilogue. Each chapter is comprised of a dual narrative structure. It is, in the main, told in the 3^rd person, but roughly a third of the book (27 chapters, at final count ) is told from the 1^st person perspective of a young girl enslaved by the Flash House. Mind you, the Iceman doesn't remember making these counts but he was sufficiently on top of his game to have had pad and paper at least as near as his beloved Laphroaig.

The other major character is Johanna Shaw. Her chapters are often thoughts or dialogue reported from the 3rd person perspective of the omniscient author.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of Johanna's husband, the correspondent Aidan Shaw, in the hinterlands of communist China and her adoption of the flash house captive, Kamla, possessor of the 1^st person voice of the narrative. The first book deals with Johanna's and Kamla's attempt to locate the missing Aidan. Along for the trek is an Australian friend of the correspondent, Lawrence and Simon, the  Shaw's little boy.  These four will bond as if a family during the course of their adventures. Lawrence will become Johanna's lover and the children's surrogate father and the complexities of each will eventually lead to disasters for all.

The main characters and the intrigues of the plot are richly drawn. Ms. Liu is a master of modulating the conflicts that seethe within each. She is equally adept at filtering the narrative through secondary characters no less deftly rendered. Of these, the Iceman's favorite was Helen James, the mother of a character whose body is discovered in a hastily dug grave near the end of Book One. Helen James is a cameo of a few pages in a single chapter. Her summation of: "Once death has come and gone, the passage of time is irrelevant," is a touchstone to the heart of the novel.

After other deaths have come and gone, Kamla restates a variation of this theme in the minor key that modulates wistfully in the Epilogue: "Through blind faith and bewildered longing, through that craving for some impossible goodness we had turned against one another."

The Iceman will not reveal the surprises Ms. Liu saves for her denouement. Suffice it to say they are devastating and more than well worth the journey. He will however reveal that the time frame at journey's end has expanded from two to fifty years. It is here that the uniqueness of Ms. Liu's narrative is paid off in a sum quite beyond the expectation of mere addition. She is too fine an artist to beat one brazenly about the head and shoulders with her revelation, but if the Iceman's guess is right, her narrative choices, at the close, are among the more brilliant in recent fiction.

The Iceman, of course, flatters himself to have been sufficiently astute to catch this final turn of the tale. Mayhaps, the revelation will surprise even Ms. Liu, but, then again, her inspirations were (most probably) not aged within the smoky peat of an Islay Single Malt. He will leave the discovery in question to the sleuth and Scotch within in each interested reader.

The Iceman is about to enjoy the reward of a much-deserved nap. He is about to imbibe a 'hair of the dog' that so faithfully companioned his journey across India to the shadows of the Himalayas. The Iceman is about to fall unconscious to the floor.

He commendeth the volume, unreservedly.