Get The Chinese Love Pavilion Authored By Paul Scott Version

Love Pavilion was built by a Chinese merchant in Malaya, Within the Love Pavilion is an antechamber decorated with friezes of dragons, fish, and birds beyond that room is the Golden Room, then the Jade Room, and finally the Scarlet Room.
When the Japanese invaded Malaya during World War II, and held it foryears, the Chinese merchant was beheaded, His head was displayed on a pole for all of the villagers to see and so be instructed on the new order.
During thoseyears of occupation, depending on the whims of the occupying soldiers, villagers were marched to the courtyard of the Love Pavilion and made to kneel there.
villagers eventually lost their heads in front of the Chinese merchant's pavilion, The courtyard became known as the Garden of Madness,

The Love Pavilion was written by one of my favorite authors, Paul Scott, It displays many of the virtues that I loved in his sitelinkRaj Quartet: dense, sometimes hallucinatory prose full of vivid description of landscapes, places, bodies, faces characterization that goes deep, so that a certain understanding of his characters is reached, while still leaving them ambiguous, capable of terrible deeds themes that are concerned with masculinity and femininity and gender roles, the shifting roles of colonizer and colonized, and the metaphysical: what is the nature of the mind, what is the purpose of existence.
You know, light stuff.

The Love Pavilion is about Mysticism versus Rationalism, Mysticism is embodied by Brian Saxby, an adventurer always reaching for higher places, lesstraveled paths, ways of existence not bound to tradition or by society.
Saxby is first mentor to our protagonist, then symbolic father figure, then a person to be hunted Saxby eventually becomes something very dangerous, murderous, a threat to those who would move on past the nowended war, an animal in the jungle that must be put down.
Rationalism is embodied by every other male character with a speaking part, not including our protagonist, Rationalism is shown at its weakest, most pathetically sentimental, most understandable, in Major Reid: a Good Man, a man's man, father to his troop of soldier boys, guardian of masculine codes, tormented by an inchoate guilt over his ambiguous past failures, a leader who views the slaughter of supposed enemies as a pleasant daytime activity, characterbuilding for his young lions, much like the enjoyment he provides them in the evening: the whores who shall visit and pamper them in the Love Pavilion.


The Love Pavilion's protagonist is Tom Brent, who must find his own way between these two paths, He is a compelling, frustrating, wounded, relatable character, Although perhaps most relatable to, . . men. This is a man's book in that all women are viewed through a certain lens of condescension by its characters, They exist to please and sometimes irritate men, A man's needs include sexual gratification and it is expected that the Malay women shall provide this on demand, Even relatable Tom feels this, at one point asking his boss Greystone another Rational Man if he could have a girl assigned to him during his time working the land, a village girl who can cook his meals, handle his laundry, service his sexual needs at end of day.
He asks this as casually as a person would ask for a towel to dry themselves after bathing, Only one man in this novel does not think of women this way: the murderous mystic, Brian Saxby,

The Love Pavilion's love interest is Teena Chang, biracial, mistress of the whores of the Love Pavilion, a whore herself.
Teena has two faces that she displays to signal how she will be engaging with her clients: her European mood and her Chinese mood.
These faces, these moods, are alternately Rational and Mystical, She puts them on and takes them off as she sees fit, Teena, unlike each and every other male character, recognizes that such moods, such ideas, should not be the sole attribute of any person, they should be adopted as needed, and discarded in the same way.
Teena's world is a small one, purposely so a world that is not concerned with the loftier goals of Mysticism and Rationalism.
Of course, Tom falls quickly and deeply in love with Teena, Of course, Teena must die, There is only room for binary thinking in the great big world of men, the men who would create and use the Love Pavilion as they see fit.
I love Paul Scott, the author of the Raj Quartet, His books perfectly reflect the best and the worst of the British in India and, at the same time, give a beautifully drawn picture of the country.
The Chinese Love Pavilion is atypically set mainly in Malaya, just after the end of the Second World War, The army are looking for Saxby who is supected of various murders and has disappeared into the jungle, They enlist the help of Tom Brent who has known Saxby, an eccentric and strange character, The Chinese Love Pavilion is where the army officers meet their Chinese mistresses, a mysterious place full of sensual colours and imagery.
This is a love story as well as a novel about mysticism, power and corruption, I am enjoying it immensely, The Love Pavilion follows a young British clerk, Tom Brent, who must track down a former friendnow suspected of murderin Malaya.
Tom faces great danger, both from the mysterious Malayan jungles and the political tensions between British officers, but the novel is perhaps most memorable for the strange, beautiful romance between Tom and a protean Eurasian beauty whom he meets in the eponymous Chinese Love Pavilion.
As in The Raj Quartet, the setting is interesting, the characters are powerful, and the storyline is griping, I thoroughly enjoyed this book,
The Love Pavilionopens with the first person narrator, British Tom Brent, reflecting back on a scene of great exoticism: the Chinese "love pavilion" on the grounds of a small estate in Malaya, where he had gone in search of an old and mysterious friend and fallen in love with a halfChinese prostitute in.
The estate had been owned by a wealthy Chinese merchant, who was murdered one day and his head set on a pike to frighten and warn onlookers.
Then the pavilion became the site of executions of Chinese soldiers/guerrillas the Japanese had conquered Malaya and occupied it from, At the point when the British kicked out the Japanese, the pavilion with its beautiful green, yellow, and scarlet rooms became the location of assignations between the local British officers and several young Chinese prostitutes who would dress in gowns corresponding to the colors of their rooms the British officer would wear a dressing robe in the color of the prostitute whose company he chose to enjoy that night.
Tom Brent tells us that

he had fallen in love with one of these prostitutes, Teena Chang but his story begins earlier, in India.


Brent at the age of about twenty has left England to make his way in India, since that was the path of his grandfather.
He's an orphan, I think at any rate, familyless, aimless, and ambitionless, He lands in Bombay where he works as a lowlevel clerk until he happens to cross paths with a charismatic fellowBrit about ten or fifteen years older named Brian Saxby, who also seems to have no career.
Saxby waxes philosophical, endlessly. This put me in mind of some of the manly philosophizing that tends to go on in the thrillers of John Buchan, although a lurid by which I actually mean pale imitation thereof.
Brent and Saxby become friends, more or less, Saxby persuades Brent to leave Bombay, which Saxby derides as dull, for Punjab to work on the arid lands of a farmer he knows named Greystone.
Brent spends about four years working these arid lands, though Greystone never seems to be able to grow anything, At this point we are aboutpages into the novel, and it seems aimless and purposeless indeed, In Bombay Brent has an affair with an Indian girl whose nipples are always straining the fabric of her clothes, In the Punjab he dates a British girl named Millicent, but tells us the relationship will never go anywhere,

The war intervenes although very, very succinctly, Brent does something during the war fights, maybe Leads a platoon It's hard to say and it's all over in a sentence or two.
Then a Major Turner asks him to go to Malaya to find Brian Saxby, who has gone to ground, The Chinese merchant has been found murdered, and Brian Saxby is Suspect Number One, This plot turn is a nice development for the reader, who was just about to donate the novel to the local Rosicrucian Society for the Betterment of Illiterates.
Now instead of skimming endless lame philosophical conversations and waiting as Greystone tries to knead something living from the soil, perhaps we might be embarking on a Heart of Darknessesque journey.


In Malaya, Brent is housed with the local British army officers, Their leader, Major Reid, kindly donates the time and services of his prostitute, Teena Chang said by some to be the most beautiful woman in Malaya to Brent.
Let it be said that everything in the novel having to do with women, prostitutes, and love feels like a phony scaffold on which Scott is constructing the idea of "the exotic.
" It takes the novel into Reader's Digest Condensed Books territory, What the reader wants is more of the huntforSaxby plotline, which, granted, is not that far above Reader's Digest, But at least it feels like an adventure, with menace, and intriguingly, the sense of menace comes not only from the mysterious Saxby, who from various accounts is either dead, dying, sick, or gone completely off his rocker and darkening his skin and dressing like a Sikh, but also from the triggerhappy British officers assisting in the hunt for Saxby.


I was a huge fan of Scott's The Raj Quartet, but I also read it years ago and I'm hoping when I reread it it won't be as disappointing as The Love Pavilion.
Librarian Note: There is than one author in the Goodreads database with this name, sitelink See this thread for information, Paul Scott was born in London in, He served in the army fromto, mainly in India and Malaya, He is the author of thirteen distinguished novels including his famous The Raj Quartet, In, Staying On won the Booker Prize, Paul Scott died in. Librarian Note: There is than one author in the Goodreads database with this name, sitelink See this thread for information, Paul Scott was born in London in, He served in the army fromto, mainly in India and Malaya, He is the author of thirteen distinguished novels including his famous The Raj Quartet, In, Staying On won the Booker Prize, Paul Scott died in. sitelink.