Books: Bigger Than Life

TAI-PAN by James Clavell. 590 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.

The Opium War in 1841. Hong Kong. The plague. War junks. Tongs. China clippers sailing on the tide (and on nearly every page). May-may, a Chinese concubine who gargles baby urine. Gorth Brock, a bastardo degenerado. Wolfgang Mauss. Shevaun. The priapic painter Aristotle Quance. Redhaired, green-eyed, sharkproof Dirk Struan, Tai-Pan (Supreme Leader) of The Noble House, trader in poppies, mayhem and tea.

By Odin's foreskin!, as the author says. What isn't in this belly-gutting, god-rotting typhoon of a book? In his bestselling first novel King Rat, James Clavell may have been only clearing his throat for this one, which seems every bit as long as it is. Its narrative pace is numbing, its style is deafening, its language penny dreadful. All the characters whirl like dervishes, especially Dirk Struan, a kind of Scottish superman who can borrow $5,000,000 in silver ingots from an Oriental tycoon, invent binoculars, and corner the world supply of cinchona bark, all without breathing very hard. Well, almost. His Scots accent wavers a bit under stress: "Damned if he'll get away with it, Will! He'll no get awa' with it!"

It's all nonsense, of course. But there are worse literary crimes than that. Clavell's book can claim kinship to those wonderful lithographs of the Battle of the Little Bighorn that once decorated every barroom. It isn't art and it isn't truth. But its very energy and scope command the eye.