The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel
by Maureen Lindley

Release Date: 7th Jan 2008
Publisher: Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978 0 7475 9116 0
RRP: Ł10.99

It is difficult for any book to dampen my love for literature, but I despaired at this. Somewhere in my head I can rationalise the need for this woman, clearly traumatised by her past, to relive all the sordid details of her unorthodox upbringing and further into her adult life to recount the various life changing decisions she made – and yes, I suppose, being a princess and surviving a world war adds a little of the exotic and untouchable to the story – but I still can’t find it in myself to like this book.

Eastern Jewel is a Manchu Princess who has been banished from her family home in China to a blood brother in Japan. Hardly the happiest of beginnings by any standard and if one were to try to analyse how these events may have affected her personality, one could understand the rather self obsessed and narcissistic tendencies given that very few people in her life seem to have cared for her. The author does acknowledge that poetic licence has been used to fabricate reasoning behind some of the more dubious actions of this extraordinary woman, but that only leads us to question how much is truth and how much is fiction? It also blurs the lines about how much of the dubious actions are real and how much imagined by the author to create more intrigue... all of which ends up pouring reality with fantasy into a melting pot and hoping something entertaining comes of it.

Sex plays a huge part of this novel. In fact, the blue haze seems to lift itself off the pages in parts. I am not squeamish about the practicalities of life, nor am I oblivious to the fact that many women – not just princesses – are subjected to horrific lives of being used as sexual objects... however, the apparent abandon with which Eastern Jewel gives her body to men as though it were an empty vessel does nothing to help the reader believe that she considers herself above men – in fact, it illustrates quite clearly that she is incapable of existing without using her sexual guile to manipulate her circumstances, something I’m not convinced feminists, or indeed most intelligent women, would be happy about. She isn’t sexually liberated; she is trapped by her own wanton desires.

It was disappointing too that we learn little about the changing world around her. The literary style being abrupt and disjointed at times. Lindley, seemingly uncomfortable with elaborating on any subject other than the sexual exploits of her unlikely heroine, jumps from day to week to year with the unease of someone who can’t make up their mind which lane of traffic to get into.

There are far better eastern delights in the literary world – Memoirs of a Geisha and White Swan immediately spring to mind... This is good for titillation and little else.

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