|
|||
One day, after I had written my first two Robin Ballantyne books, I found myself walking along a Beijing street and trying to decide where to set my third book. It had to be somewhere gritty, I thought. It had to be somewhere chaotic and full of energy, where corruption and power hold sway over the law, and where darkness and hardship lurk underneath glamour. I racked my brain.
I've spent sixteen years of my adult life in China and Hong Kong. I've lived in Beijing longer than I've lived anywhere else in my life.
There's a lot to be said for living in Beijing, and pollution and traffic to be said against it. Sometimes I think wistfully about living in Britain. In South London we would not have all-night construction happening just outside our bedroom window, a spotlight shining around the edges of our curtains, cranes groaning, dangling lumps of concrete, and construction teams hanging clinging precariously to scaffolding. In South London we would not wake up once in a while to find, when we pulled the curtains back, that the world had been turned yellow overnight by a sandstorm that had dumped desert over everything. Or to find that we could not see beyond the house opposite because of the smog. But then, in South London, we would not have what we have here in Beijing, which is the sense that history is rapidly unfolding in front of our eyes.
The third Robin Ballantyne book, The Pool of Unease, is set in Beijing. It will be published in 2007 and it introduces a new character, a private detective called Song (the 'o' is pronounced like the 'u' in pudding), a disaffected former police officer. The Pool of Unease is a thriller set against pollution, corruption, the gap between rich and poor, the lack of a free press, the power of the economy, the hunger for growth, the breakneck speed of change…