Tome: Shogun

Shogun by James Clavell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
You either buy into the epic romanticism of Clavell's mammoth (in size and popularity) bestseller or you don't.

Historical verisimilitude isn't the agenda here. You get the trappings of period flavour, but Clavell's 16th Century Japan is mere backdrop to the myriad sub-plots of Byzantine political manueverings, jockeying for prime trading monopolies, war plans and an inter-racial love story strung along the key plot thread of a ship-wrecked Englishman's gradual assimilation into the society and impending battle between 2 rival warlords in Feudal Japan.

Re-reading snatches of Shogun after a 20 year gap still shows it to be an incredibly engaging yarn, and hardly colours my long-time belief that Clavell was a master-story teller with a knack for sustaining engaging narratives over an intimidating length of pages.

The history is there for colour, but what Clavell largely delivers, much like Ken Follett's The Pillars Of The Earth, is pure Medieval Soap Opera.

The dichotomoy of a rigid society of equisitely cultivated rituals and manners with a penchant for sudden vicious brutality is conveyed engagingly enough through the eyes of a befuddled John Blackthorne, later to be dubbed Anjin (Pilot)-San owing to the sheer "unpronounceability" of his English name by Japanese tongues.

But less one feel tempted to castigate Clavell for the exoticism of his subjects, note that while Blackthorne is positioned as the story's token hero, as the book progresses, he becomes one of many pawns on the strategic chessboard of the brilliant and charismatic Yoshi Toranaga as he jockeys for power against key rival Ishido for the position of Ultimate Commander, the Shogun.

Deliriously entertaining for much of it's colossal length, Shogun's still the Gold Standard by which I measure Far East epics for their sheer readability and entertainment factor and Clavell was simply the best at delivering them.

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