Newspaper Article

Clavell's disappointing swan song

Reviewed by John Evans Note: TITLE: Escape. AUTHOR: James Clavell. PUBLISHER: (Coronet, 584 pages).

1996

Overview

ONE can glean quite a lot from perusing the cover of James Clavell's posthumously published novel Escape. The author's name is printed in much larger letters than the title - on the spine as well as the front cover - inferring ... what? That the book ought to be bought because it's from the pen of James Clavell, regardless of its merit? Maybe. And the very title Escape seems a bit limp (thought at least it matches the brevity of all his previous titles). As for the lilac-hued cover illustration, it could easily grace the cover of some outlandish science-fiction yarn. There is a medieval walled town set in a landscape redolent of Shelley's magnificent sonnet `Ozymandias', a spindly helicopter hovering just above a tall minaret, and a European-looking couple with impossibly long legs standing somewhere in the foreground. It's a Persian dreamland rather than the actual setting for the novel, the turbulent Iran of late 1979, the Shah scuttled and the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini about to come sweeping in ... The inside cover has a three-quarter-length colour photograph of Clavell, looking suitably rugged and vaguely nautical (as befits \"the son of a Royal Navy family\"). But alarm bells start ringing when one reads that Escape, \"which is the love story from Whirlwind, was published after his death and originated as the basis for a film script\".

• Publisher: The New Straits Times Press (M) Berhad