Mountain of Immoderate Desires

The teeming world of Victorian colonial Hong Kong comes vibrantly alive in Wilson's ingenious and captivating third novel (after Malefice). Samuel Pink, raised in an English rectory by the Reverend and Mrs. Pink, is told by his tutor, Reynolds, that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria, who wishes his very existence kept a secret. Whisked off to a civil service job in Hong Kong in 1887 at the age of 21, Samuel falls in love with Lily Jackson, a young Chinese woman who, as an orphan, had been rescued from the streets by a lecherous English scholar, Mr. Jackson, and ``schooled'' by him in Taoist sexual practices. Priggish, cowardly Samuel, aware that his clandestine interracial romance, if discovered, could bring him ostracism and disgrace, alternately spurns and clings to Lily-who, desperately wanting a child, strikes up an affair with a middle-aged Scottish doctor. Meanwhile, Reynolds, now down and out, joins a nihilist political sect and, through his correspondence with Samuel, awakens him to the evils of colonialism. The plot, which includes a suicide, a murder, an epidemic and two eccentric missionary sisters who demand semi-erotic massages from Lily, climaxes in a surprise revelation of Samuel's true parentage. Throughout, Wilson's delightful, quicksilver style is a fine-tuned instrument unmasking Victorian hypocrisies. (Nov.)