An ambitious debut novel from a handsome actor turned aspiring novelist? I must admit I started reading The Eunuch wondering if it would prove a triumph of fan sales expectations over the quality of writing. After an initial hook of interest from the set-up, it took a little time to get used to the dense police procedural style applied to medieval bureaucracy and palace intrigue, but once I was acclimatized, the novel held my interest in a tight grip to the very end. It’s a brilliant read, which excels both as a mystery and as an atmospheric historical drama.
The Eunuch is set in 1153, a third of the way into the short-lived Jin dynasty (1115–1234). This was an empire ruled by the Jurchen people, ancestors of the better known Manchu. The twelfth century was a time when China was divided, with the Southern Song dynasty in the south, its capital at Hangzhou, and the Jin in the north, the capital (not named in the book) in modern-day Harbin, about a thousand kilometers northeast of Beijing.
On a winter’s morning a scream pierces the quiet of the inner imperial palace. A cleaner has discovered something horrific. Palace guards rush to the scene, entering an antechamber through the locked doors on either end. They find the corpse of Diao Ju, a nineteen-year-old Chinese concubine. There are stab and slash wounds, her blood now cool and congealing on the floor. A dead concubine is troubling enough, but it’s the location of the crime which causes dread – the antechamber is connected to the emperor’s residence. Was this an assassination attempt, the start of a coup? An alert is issued, a state of emergency declared, and troops deployed.
Thus, in under an hour, a vast storm had spread out from that one small room, and was still expanding. If now we were to move in reverse, to slide out of the military units, back down the frozen roads through the bleak countryside to the red walls of the city, down the crowded streets, through the massive doors of the Palace, along the whispering corridors and back to the small antechamber from which it had begun, we would see, standing over the body of the dead concubine, the Head of Imperial Investigations, the eunuch, Encengkei Gett.
Being placed in charge of this investigation is a poisoned chalice for Gett – he will make enemies in his uncovering of secrets, and hanging above the case is the danger of embarrassing the young emperor, who is just seventeen and one year into his reign. After all, given the low odds that an assassin could penetrate into the antechamber – restricted to harem officials and concubines, and with layers of security – the prime suspect is the emperor; perhaps he, “for whatever reason (and whatever reason he had was legally valid) had simply killed one of his concubines.”
Gett is the eunuch of the title, a tall, bony Jurchen, with sunken cheeks and a weathered face making him look older than his forty years. He has teeth stained from chewing betel nut, the stimulating properties of which he has much need as he works around the clock to solve the murder case. His sleep deprivation adds to the tension of the novel, because a simple error of judgment, a misspoken word could prove fatal. His addiction is also fun, a riff on fictional detectives’ stereotypical overindulgence of alcohol and tobacco. Betel nut comes from the subtropics so it was a surprise to encounter the mild narcotic in the far north. A possible explanation is that the betel nut was sent from Southeast Asia as tribute, though the novel doesn’t explain its presence.
Part of the rush to solve the murder is that an important event is taking place at the palace in a few days: the imperial examinations. Held every two years, the examinations see the brightest of the bright – those who have passed the local and then provincial exam – competing to gain high position in the civil service.
Then a vicious reshuffling; some families went home, some vanished and others were invited in to grab hold of new and very real power. To be one of the very few who emerged from that chaos sane and with that power, you needed to want it beyond every other thing that existed in life. So it was a time of murders. But only after the test.
Not, and this was the crux of the matter at hand, three days before it.
The antechamber – basically a hallway – in which the concubine’s body was found has two entrances: doors locked from the outsides and carefully guarded, all movements meticulously scrutinized and recorded. So, what we have here is a subgenre of detective fiction: a locked room mystery. These stories involve a seemingly impossible murder, the impossibility coming from how the crime scene is “locked.” There are three maps at the start of the book, useful for following the story. Although The Eunuch starts off as a locked room mystery and retains a claustrophobic menace to the end, it soon becomes something much bigger than a puzzle mystery, a thriller with wide-ranging threads.
Gett is razor sharp, calm and calculating yet border-line paranoid in assessing the potential risks he faces. It’s this combination that kept him alive when he spied among the Chinese in the south. He’s a survivor and an obedient servant. He does, however, become a more sympathetic character as the novel goes on. Out in the city, beyond the palace walls, he questions residents from various walks of life. Prompted by meeting an educated but impoverished clerk, he ponders their fates.
Gett thought about himself, thought about these people. Village girls were denied a palace posting and ended as prostitutes. Eunuchs were castrated, didn’t secure a palace position, ended as beggars. Scholars took the Examination, failed and ended like this. Small men, growing older, in poverty, all the money of their villages exhausted. Working for a bed and a desk to study on.
They all disappeared into the city like grain casings scattered by wind. The discarded husks of the very few who slipped through the cracks and into power.
Having a eunuch as the protagonist investigating a crime involving sex is an inspired choice. Despite lacking personal experience of lust, he is a shrewd judge of character and of human motivations.
The Eunuch is Jonathan Kos-Read’s first novel. The American has, however, written two screenplays, and he has clocked in two decades of acting experience in China. Kos-Read seems to have a natural feel for dialogue; the staccato question-and-answer exchanges in the novel, with the speakers sparring, relentlessly probing and repelling, are extremely effective. Likewise, the plotting is strong, with forward momentum in new directions balanced by periodic circling back to the main characters and re-examination of the facts. The period color is great and the resolution of the mystery clever, the conclusion satisfying. I finished the novel with sadness at having come to the end of such a gripping read and with admiration for the author’s skill, sweat, and imagination in writing such an original and powerful work.
The Eunuch is published by Earnshaw Books and is available from Amazon.com and other retailers.
