GeneChing
03-07-2011, 10:49 AM
Books: A Canadian kung-fu heroine (http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Books+Canadian+kung+heroine/4391471/story.html)
Globe-trotting, gorgeous and gay Ava Lee kicks off a series
By Kevin Chong, Postmedia News March 6, 2011
The Water Rat of Wanchai
By Ian Hamilton House of Anansi, $19.95
Writing about the detective fiction of Henning Mankell, which is set in smalltown Sweden, philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggests that crime writing in the age of globalization is characterized, paradoxically, by a preoccupation with the local. A truly global citizen, Zizek asserts, is "the one who (re)discovers or returns to (or identifies with) some particular roots, some specific substantial communal identity."
The protagonist of Ian Hamilton's globe-hopping crime thriller The Water Rat of Wanchai, Ava Lee, identifies herself with a community that is, by turns, cosmopolitan, regional and rootless. A Chinese-Canadian living in Toronto, she maintains extensive ties to Hong Kong, including her paternalistic, if vaguely sinister, employ-er, whom she calls "Uncle."
Strikingly attractive, Havergaleducated, and gay, Ava is a forensic accountant in her early thirties who has passed up a lifetime of tax returns for a far more swashbuckling kind of bean-counting: relocating, by any means necessary, fortunes stolen by one shady businessman from another. As the novel begins, she's been contacted by the nephew of a friend of Uncle's. He has had $5 million taken from him after botched dealings with a seafood company that's headed by someone named Jackson Seto.
Hot on the scent of fishy money, Ava leaves Toronto for Seattle, Hong Kong, Thailand, Guyana and the British Virgin Islands. In these far-flung locales, she finagles vital data from banking officials and bureaucrats alike with her guile and looks. When her charm offensive sputters in Bangkok, she blackmails one unwilling informant with naked photos of him with a transgendered prostitute.
The Water Rat of Wanchai is the first of four novels starring Ava Lee slated to appear in the next two years. In the age of Lisbeth Salander, it's not hard to see why Hamilton's jet-setting heroine is so appealing. Credibly constructed by Hamilton, who's worked as a journalist, international businessman and diplomat, Ava's personality is defined by her cosmopolitan, bicultural upbringing. Like any Hong Kong ID card-carrier, she's brand-conscious, work-obsessed, pragmatic and loyal to her family. Like any Canadian passport holder, she's culturally sensitive, wellmannered, able to blend in and independent.
While Ava doesn't have any of the personal complications that make Mankell's Kurt Wallender so involving, or the eccentricity that makes Marge Gunderson in the film Fargo so endearingly memorable, her lethal knowledge of a form of kung fu torques up her sex appeal to the approximate level of a female lead in a Quentin Tarantino film.
The first half of The Water Rat of Wanchai, however, is painfully devoid of any narrative urgency. The reader follows Ava to Seattle to find Seto's abandoned office; to Hong Kong, where she has an uneventful lunch with her father, a factory owner who has three separate families in the old-school Chinese manner; we even get an entire chapter devoted to a stopover in Trinidad that could easily have been summarized in a paragraph. At no point in the book's first 180 pages or so is Ava's investigation ever sidetracked or her safety jeopardized.
Fortunately, the second half of the book ramps up both the pacing and the kung-fu fighting. A couple of vicious altercations, a kidnapping and a corrupt Guyanese police chief give the story the spring it lacks early on. All of this bodes well for the next instalment of Ava Lee's accounting adventures, due out this summer. Perhaps that one will get off to a running start.
Born in Hong Kong and the son of an accountant, Kevin Chong is the author of two forthcoming books: a novel titled Beauty Plus Pity and a memoir on horse racing.I admire a book reviewer who can draw in Zizek and Salander (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57359).
Globe-trotting, gorgeous and gay Ava Lee kicks off a series
By Kevin Chong, Postmedia News March 6, 2011
The Water Rat of Wanchai
By Ian Hamilton House of Anansi, $19.95
Writing about the detective fiction of Henning Mankell, which is set in smalltown Sweden, philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggests that crime writing in the age of globalization is characterized, paradoxically, by a preoccupation with the local. A truly global citizen, Zizek asserts, is "the one who (re)discovers or returns to (or identifies with) some particular roots, some specific substantial communal identity."
The protagonist of Ian Hamilton's globe-hopping crime thriller The Water Rat of Wanchai, Ava Lee, identifies herself with a community that is, by turns, cosmopolitan, regional and rootless. A Chinese-Canadian living in Toronto, she maintains extensive ties to Hong Kong, including her paternalistic, if vaguely sinister, employ-er, whom she calls "Uncle."
Strikingly attractive, Havergaleducated, and gay, Ava is a forensic accountant in her early thirties who has passed up a lifetime of tax returns for a far more swashbuckling kind of bean-counting: relocating, by any means necessary, fortunes stolen by one shady businessman from another. As the novel begins, she's been contacted by the nephew of a friend of Uncle's. He has had $5 million taken from him after botched dealings with a seafood company that's headed by someone named Jackson Seto.
Hot on the scent of fishy money, Ava leaves Toronto for Seattle, Hong Kong, Thailand, Guyana and the British Virgin Islands. In these far-flung locales, she finagles vital data from banking officials and bureaucrats alike with her guile and looks. When her charm offensive sputters in Bangkok, she blackmails one unwilling informant with naked photos of him with a transgendered prostitute.
The Water Rat of Wanchai is the first of four novels starring Ava Lee slated to appear in the next two years. In the age of Lisbeth Salander, it's not hard to see why Hamilton's jet-setting heroine is so appealing. Credibly constructed by Hamilton, who's worked as a journalist, international businessman and diplomat, Ava's personality is defined by her cosmopolitan, bicultural upbringing. Like any Hong Kong ID card-carrier, she's brand-conscious, work-obsessed, pragmatic and loyal to her family. Like any Canadian passport holder, she's culturally sensitive, wellmannered, able to blend in and independent.
While Ava doesn't have any of the personal complications that make Mankell's Kurt Wallender so involving, or the eccentricity that makes Marge Gunderson in the film Fargo so endearingly memorable, her lethal knowledge of a form of kung fu torques up her sex appeal to the approximate level of a female lead in a Quentin Tarantino film.
The first half of The Water Rat of Wanchai, however, is painfully devoid of any narrative urgency. The reader follows Ava to Seattle to find Seto's abandoned office; to Hong Kong, where she has an uneventful lunch with her father, a factory owner who has three separate families in the old-school Chinese manner; we even get an entire chapter devoted to a stopover in Trinidad that could easily have been summarized in a paragraph. At no point in the book's first 180 pages or so is Ava's investigation ever sidetracked or her safety jeopardized.
Fortunately, the second half of the book ramps up both the pacing and the kung-fu fighting. A couple of vicious altercations, a kidnapping and a corrupt Guyanese police chief give the story the spring it lacks early on. All of this bodes well for the next instalment of Ava Lee's accounting adventures, due out this summer. Perhaps that one will get off to a running start.
Born in Hong Kong and the son of an accountant, Kevin Chong is the author of two forthcoming books: a novel titled Beauty Plus Pity and a memoir on horse racing.I admire a book reviewer who can draw in Zizek and Salander (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57359).