Product Description

Harry Airton, a Scottish fisherman, has China in his blood. A chance encounter with a spook during the Korean War gives him the opportunity to return to the land of his birth and serve his goverment at the same time. They hatch a long-term plan to create the perfect spy: a triple agent with a cover that cant be broken, because its genuine.

What Harry doesnt realise is that if he is setting the perfect trap, the Communist Chinese may also be finding the perfect bait. And that as the Cold War escalates and China marches towards Cultural Revolution and the end of the twentieth-century, the fates of two people who love each other are entirely unimportant

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74690 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Review

'Adam Williams has written a true epic, spanning many decades and incorporating real events of magnitude. It is not easy to explain historical context entertainingly, but Williams pulls it off.'

(The Times on THE DRAGON'S TAIL )

'This is a magnificent climax to Adam Williams' epic trilogy covering the history of modern China . . . An extremely well plotted spy novel . . . it is a great read with strong and sympathetic characters struggling to maintain their humanity in the midst of the terrible events which engulfed China after 1949. The sections relating to the Chinese labour camps and the bitter betrayals of the survivors . . . raise the novel into the realm of high literature. Many people will read this for many years to come to understand China better.' (Jasper Becker, author of The Chinese on THE DRAGON'S TAIL )

'A bewitching, unpredictable spy thriller. A harrowing but noble love story. A mirror onto half a century of Chinese history - I have no doubt that this will become a classic.' (James Kynge, author of China Shakes the World on THE DRAGON'S TAIL )

'This book is poetic and romantic in parts, harrowing and tragic in others . . . Persevere when the going gets tough and you'll be richly rewarded.' ****

(Heat on THE EMPEROR'S BONES )

'Epic . . . a story that suggests history is repeated not as farce, but as adventure and romance.'

(Financial Times on THE EMPEROR'S BONES )

'An epic historical and romantic story as well as an impressive first novel.' (Sunday Mirror on THE PALACE OF HEAVENLY PLEASURE )

About the Author
Adam Williams, whose family has lived in China since the late nineteenth century, was born and raised in Hong Kong. For the last eighteen years he has been representative in Beijing of a Far East trading conglomerate. In 1999 he received an OBE for services to Sino-British trade.

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Customer Reviews

An epic of modern China
Harry Airton is an orphan of old China, the son of a missionary doctor caught up in the turmoil of Japan's brutal occupation and Mao Tse Tung's revolution. His childhood friend is Chen Tao. Innocently, they play together as children with games such as forging blood ties, until political tumult intervenes and Harry ends up being raised by an uncle and aunt in Scotland's Outer Hebrides. He trains to become a fisherman, but never loses his love for China or his yearning to return. We're with Harry again as a private soldier in the Korean War of the 1950s where his knowledge of the Chinese enemy and his subtle skill at dealing with them, bring him to the attention of Julian, a British intelligence agent. China is trying to build a nuclear weapon and Britain needs an agent inside to try and stop it. Harry, brooding, bright, ultimately dangerous, is the man they pick.

The Dragon's Tail is an incredible epic of a novel that takes us from Harry's early idyllic childhood in China, through the Korean War, to Cold War Eastern Europe, and then finally with Harry back to China as Mao Tse Tung's disastrous leadership was beginning to take grip. There, working undercover as a spy, he first finds Chen Tao, now a wheeling-dealing Communist Party official and then Ziwei, the daughter of one his mother's best friends. It is here that we are pulled into the impossible moral choices that those living in totalitarian societies have to make every day. Adam Williams draws us through a tense and real world of betrayal and counter-betrayal that he also blends into a love story of both catastrophe and hope. According to the cover flap, Williams knows China well and his writing shows it.

The taut scenes of diplomacy carried out around Chinese negotiating tables are brilliantly drawn; the destruction of civilised life during Mao's Cultural Revolution are shocking and depressing; the horrific scenes inside China's labour camps bring you to a standstill with a need to pause for thought; and the final built up to the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989 kept me reading until the early hours of the morning. Congratulations, Mr Williams. This is a magnificent book

Gripping narrative; imaginative power and complete historical grasp. A superb read.
The third epic in this gripping series of novels set in China, following now the fortunes of Harry Airton (Catharine's son), through the Sino-Japanese war as a young boy and his later return to China as a double agent. A meticulously crafted plot sees him pitted against his childhood friend, Chen Tao, who sets up a sting with the attractive Ziwei. Complex machinations end in a love affair; the eventual failure of Harry's plot; and his self-imposed exile to Canada. This is the barest outline of the first part of this blockbuster.
The author's imagination and his complete grasp of China's history blend powerfully as he then describes the tribulations of Ziwei through the Laogai and the Cultural Revolution. This is harrowing; the darkest echoes of "Wild Swans" are detailed through his convincing characters and the desperate measures taken to survive. Betrayal and counter-betrayal are again themes explored here.
The third phase sets up a dramatic climax with Ziwei's daughter as an ardent student protester in Tiananmen square, oblivious of the pending mayhem. And as the author observed these events himself he is even more authoritative as the plot brings the two main protagonists together in a scheme to save daughter and mother when the slaughter commences.
And the lovers? Is their brief and emotionally confusing reunion in Beijing to be all? The eventual postcard showing a whale sends Harry off in his fishing boat, if not into the sunset, certainly with some hope of finding Ziwei again in what the reader imagines to be permanent reunion.
This is a powerful novel, superbly written and utterly convincing in its characterisation and scope over a chilling period in China's history.

Overlong Thriller Fails to Deliver
I'm starting to think, I should stop reading novels that clock in at anything over four hundred pages, I forever seem to be saying that they are full of padding. This is exactly what I thought of 'The Dragon's Tail'. I had no idea that this was the third book of a trilogy, and although I probably missed out on any continuity of narrative from the previous instalments, this book stands on it's own as a complete read.

'The Dragon's Tail' is split into three discrete sections, the first deals with espionage in China in the 1960's, the second, conditions in a Chinese labour camp and the third, the events leading up to, and including, the Tienanmen Square uprisings.

I found each section interesting but overly long. The first part details the setting up of double and triple agents inside of China, and although the tension is patiently built up, this section is almost too realistic. Inevitably, the planting of a deep undercover agent is painstaking and laborious; I suspect Williams' portrayal of this process is accurate, but too little happens over too many pages. Then, just as things are starting to get exciting, and having spent many hundreds of words delicately constructing his house of cards, the author knocks them all over in about ten pages and the reader has to begin all over again.

The second part of the novel, is set inside a Chinese Gulag, and contains some very affecting writing on the strength of the human spirit, and the amazing ability humans have of heaping cruelty and suffering upon their fellows. Sadly however, there is very little that is original in this part of the novel. Stitching endless pages together using quotes from Mao's 'Little Red Book' may induce feelings of incredulity in the reader, but is lazy writing. Many people who have chosen to read the Dragon's Tail, were probably aware of the cruelties that took place inside the labour camps, and this book sheds little new light on the subject. At times the conversations between the women held in captivity resemble scenes from 'Prisoner Cell Block H' rather than something one would expect to find in quality literary fiction.

The third section is probably the most powerful and illuminating. At it's heart is one of the late 20th Century's enduring images, the massacre in Tienanmen square. The various plot threads start to come together and momentous events are now at centre of the story (In the earlier sections, the wider events that are taking place inside China, occur tantalisingly in the background, which I found frustrating.) Here, Williams makes what I believe to be his key point, that each generation is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

There are some good parts to 'The Dragon's Tail' but on reflection they are few and far between. The novel is readable, and asks difficult questions about the culpability of the entire population of China, from peasant to party chief, in the atrocities that have occurred in the country under communist rule. Sadly though, the excitement that occasionally threatens, rarely materialises. Perhaps most frustrating of all, many of the events in this novel are predicated on implausible coincidences, which for a novel with so much ambition, is rather disappointing.