"Ch'en could not move. Finally he put out his arm, pulled the brief-case towards him, without the slightest difficulty. None of these men had had the sensation of death, nor of the failure of his plot; nothing - a brief-case which a clerk had pushed towards the edge of the counter and which its owner pulls back... And suddenly everything seemed extraordinarily easy to Ch'en. Things, even actions, did not exist; they were dreams, nothing but dreams which take possession of us because we give them force, but which we can just as easily deny... At this moment he heard the horn of a car: Chiang Kai-shek."
Andre Malraux was a French novelist active from the 1920s to the 1970s. Something of an adventurer, quite often a liar given to exaggeration, Malraux wrote Man's Fate after visiting China briefly in 1931. After WWII, French President Charles de Gaulle appointed Malraux Minister of Information, and later Minister of Cultural Affairs. He died 1976, succumbing to lung cancer after a lifetime of heavy smoking.
Man's Fate outlines the personal struggles of several communist agitators after the united front between the Chinese Nationalists and the communists begins to fall apart in Shanghai. The title is a reference to death, and also to the idea that every man can only meet it on its own terms. The character Ferral, president of the French chamber of commerce in the novel, can be seen as a stand-in for Malraux.
This novel is definitely the best known of Malraux's books. It's very French in tone, with characters often pausing during improbable moments to have conversations about free will, the inevitably of political revolution, or some other subject that captured the author's fancy at the time. It seems deep at first, but the conversations never last very long, or involve much heavy lifting on the author's part.
While reading it I thought often of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, another novel dealing with the collapse of republican China just before World War II. I think Man's Fate suffers by comparison to J.G. Ballard's more thought-provoking work, and one never gets the feeling that Man's Fate is telling a story of the same scope.
Graham Greene's The Quiet American also came to mind. But where's Greene's character Fowler says so much about fading European dreams of empire in the East, none of the characters in Man's Fate really make that same connection, or at least with the same level of resonance. Greene, of course, wrote with an economy that Malraux can't match, and all the philosophizing in the world can't make up for a lack of dramatic conflict.
Is it good? Let's say I'll give it a pass. It's definitely not long, at any rate. Yet if you're looking for a meaningful look at China before the communist takeover, you'll be disappointed by Man's Fate. It fails to connect to either the Occidental or Oriental aspects of its story, and theories of revolution aren't enough to describe the complicated politics of the period.
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