''Stories are the only thing that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine...' Peking, 1944: Sir Edmund Backhouse is a man of many parts. A polyglot scholar. An effete homosexual. A genius of perversity, a forger, arms salesman, occasional spy and fantasist. Also, if he is to be believed, the onetime lover of the redoubtable Empress Dowager of China, a woman many decades his senior. In his declining years, tended by his friend, Dr Hoeppli, he writes his memoir - 'a wild tale', as he calls it, 'far-fetched and fantastical'- of his affair with the Dowager Empress. Beijing, 2014: Linnie is an Australian woman of uncertain provenance struggling to make a living in Beijing. A Sinophile, a translator of film subtitles, the author of an unpublished novel about Backhouse called The Empress Lover. One day, she receives an intriguingly old-fashioned and formal invitation from a Professor H, an invitation that promises to reveal long hidden secrets of her family... And so two worlds collide. ' (Publication abstract)
Dedication:
For Geremie
and in loving memory of my father
Lewis Jaivin (1923-2013)
Epigraph:
Now I do not know whether I was then a man
dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a
butterfly dreaming I am a man.
–Zhuangzi (translated by Yutang)
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful
about what we pretend to be.
–Kurt Vonnegut
I saw lots of fucking tulips, as promised.
–J.D. Salinger, letter to Michael Mitchell about his 1994
European holiday
