Devil Never Sleeps

by Pearl S. Buck

1st Pan G558 1961 film tie-in edition paperback, vg In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Fiction, Drama, Nobel Prize

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker Buck was an American writer and novelist. She is best known for The Good Earth, the best-selling novel in the United States in 1931 and 1932 and which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China" and for her "masterpieces", two memoir-biographies of her missionary parents.
Buck was born in West Virginia, but in October 1892, her parents took their 4-month-old baby to China. As the daughter of missionaries and later as a missionary herself, Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, with her parents, and in Nanjing, with her first husband. She and her parents spent their summers in a villa in Kuling, Mount Lu, Jiujiang, and it was during this annual pilgrimage that the young girl decided to become a writer. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, then returned to China. From 1914 to 1932, after marrying John Lossing Buck she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but she came to doubt the need for foreign missions. Her views became controversial during the Fundamentalist–Modernist controversy, leading to her resignation. After returning to the United States in 1935, she married the publisher Richard J. Walsh and continued writing prolifically. She became an activist and prominent advocate of the rights of women and racial equality, and wrote widely on Chinese and Asian cultures, becoming particularly well known for her efforts on behalf of Asian and mixed-race adoption.

Reviews

[Susana]

Um curta mas intensa história, com a qualidade de escrita característica de Pearl Buck.
Quatro personagens principais bem delineadas e um pano de fundo bem composto tornaram a leitura fluida e agradável.
O final, dramático, pareceu-me algo apressado.

[Mehrsa]

When I first started learning Chinese about five years ago, I was very interested in acquainting myself with Chinese literature. I started searching for good Chinese novels, and ironically, my first encounter with them happened to be with an American author, not a Chinese one.

However, it might get less ironic when you consider that she lived the majority of her life in China. Therefore my goal of understanding Chinese culture and society in the 20th century was suitably accomplished because, believe me, she knew what she was talking about.

The first book I read by Buck was The Dragon Seed, and oh my god, I don't think I could ever explain the impact that book had on me and the expanse of emotions that it made me feel. I absolutely adored that book and subsequently started searching for other works by Buck, and I was not disappointed. She consistently delivered peak quality masterpieces one after another. In total, I have read four other books by her and I have loved every single one of them. I read them in this order: The Dragon Seed, The Good Earth, Mother, and Portrait of a Marriage.

In my opinion, Buck was the manifestation of a psychologist, a sociologist and a damn good storyteller. I have learned so much about human behaviour and psychology, life and myself through her books. It seems like they are treasuries of compact wisdom. I read some of her books about four or five years ago, and after all this time, I sometimes catch myself intensely thinking about them and discovering hidden layers of deep meaning in them.


But I am sad to report that this book broke the lovely streak that I optimistically presumed impossible to break. The writing quality in this one is substantially lower than that of the four previous books I've read by her. This book feels more like a play than a novel. The pacing is insanely fast to the point that the incidents seem convenient enough to be part of a play. I mean sometimes characters appeare out of thin air and if Buck was aiming for a horror book she would have hit the bullseye with this one because this shit has some hardcore jumpsacre vibes to it. If a book could ever get high as a kite on cocaine, I'd imagine this would be the result.

The story and the meaning behind it are pretty problematic. I absolutely hate how it tried to bend and salvage a rapist. That was disgusting and I didn't expect Pearl Buck, of all people, to try to do that. Isn't she the same person who portrayed rape as an unforgivable crime in the Dragon Seed book? How she could write something like this is beyond me. I honestly don't understand why. She meddled with some heavy Christian themes and ideology throughout the book and I genuinely don't like any of her interpretations or implications on those matters.

First of all, there was the matter of mundane love between a priest and a woman and it was portrayed as a great sin, while avoiding it was considered a great act of self control and saint-like glory. I don't buy that, probably because I find the Catholic Church's prohibition of marriage for priests to be very ridiculous and even harmful.
I mean, if they got married I assume there might have been fewer pedophilic crimes involved in the church.

Of course, I don't mean that all Catholic priests are pedophiles; it's just that love and connection between two adults are a very critical part of being human, and I find the idea of institutionally suppressing such fundamental human needs deeply unhealthy. When you prohibit a healthy relationship and marriage between adults, you are repressing a dragon that will eventually resurface with much greater ferociousness and animosity. To suppress the most basic human instincts is to set the ground for all sorts of mental derangement and perversion. So basically, my point is that I find the prohibition of marriage for men of the cloth so ridiculous that I couldn't see any achievement or value in O'Banion's refusal of Siu Lan's love.


The only really interesting thing in the entire book was probably the nature of Siu Lan's love for O'Banion. To her, he was different from any man that she had ever met in her entire life. He was substantially taller, bigger and stronger than all of them, and he had very distinct and different features like the blue eyes and light hair obviously. He also had a fundamentally different mentality, philosophy on life and demeanor. So she basically fell in love with his uniqueness and also everything that he represented rather than merely with the man himself.

At some point in the book he told her that her love for him stemmed from the way he represented the Lord and the kingdom of heaven, and that she was attracted to him only because she found matters of God and redemption attractive. That kind of aligns with how she used the analogy of Mother Mary's love for God or the Chinese mythology stories of the same nature to explain her love for him to herself and how she reasoned that her love is something higher and beyond the ordinary because of this exquisite essence.

So yeah, the love dynamic was interesting and different from almost anything I've ever read, that's why I believe it is a shame that Buck didn't harness it and let it bloom into something more beautiful and meaningful. Instead she chose the unexpected and incomprehensible route of trying to marry her off to her rapist. I mean what the absolute fudge, bruh. What was going on in her mind when she did that?

The book's moral framework really bothered the hell out of me. Some Christians are so hell-bent on believing that any sinner and any sin is forgivable and salvageable that they kind of lose their grip on reality sometimes. I guess I am what you could call a practical Christian because although I believe in the Lord's infinite mercy, I still believe in the human responsibility to ensure that justice is fulfilled every time. I don't believe redemption is always possible. Yeah redemption can be achieved through love, but the power of love is not redeeming enough for the case of rape. Does redemption require the victim to participate in forgiving the perpetrator? Does divine forgiveness imply human reconciliation? Does remorse erase consequences?

As I am a Christian, I'm not inherently objecting to Christian redemption. In fact, I'm objecting to the novel conflating forgiveness with restoration of intimacy and trust. Those aren't necessarily the same thing. Someone can theoretically be forgiven while still being considered morally dangerous, permanently estranged, or undeserving of romantic reconciliation. That's why I think twisting the concept of Christian forgiveness in such a deprived way was truly messed up and I didn't like how the story progresses at all.

This book made me feel disgusted and also a bit confused. It was a strange read. I started it with very high hopes, expecting to read another banger from Pearl Buck, but I was utterly and irrevocably disappointed.

After seeing how O'Banion spoke Chinese so fluently, about eighty years ago nonetheless, I felt ashamed of myself. I gotta study Chinese more strictly. Can't let an imaginary Irish character in China during the 1949 Communist takeover beat me to it, especially since he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed to begin with.

[Mohammad.Bookworm]

برعکس ریویوهایی که دیدم ازش، کتاب واقعا خوب و جالب بود
البته شاید چون اون اصل کاریای پرل باک رو نخوندم این به نظرم خوب اومده
خاک خوب و نسل اژدها رو گذاشتم برای آخر
بعد از این میرم سراغ نامه‌ای از پکن و بعدشم مادر

[Czarny Pies]

"Satan Never Sleeps" is a poor book that was subsequently made into a movie that was even worse. I read what GR describes as the "film tie-in edition". I was left wondering if Buck had not in fact written the novel with the movie adaption in mind. Whatever the factor that pushed Buck into taking up the pen, the resulting novel was far below the usual standard of one the greatest American authors of the 20th century.
The events take place in 1949 fifteen years after Buck had left China. The Communists were rapidly gaining territory and would have complete control of the nation by the end of the year. This would not have been not something that Buck would have anticipated. In the "Pavilion of Woman" published in 1946, she still was anticipating a victory by Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists. Buck is fixated on the fact that the Chinese Communists attacked Christian missions. On the other hand, she makes no mention of the fact that the Communists with the program of communal farms were also at war with the peasantry. In brief, I sensed that the authenticity of some of Buck's earlier novels such as "The Good Earth" is completely missing in "Satan Never Sleeps." By the time Buck wrote "Satan Never Sleeps" she appears to have been out of touch with the country that she had lived in for over 30 years.
The structure is also loopy. It is hard to say who the real hero or protagonist is. The first two-thirds of the book are dominated by two Irish Catholic priest. The first is Father O'Banion who has just arrived from Ireland and is not upset when he discovers that some of the Christian converts at the Catholic mission have become Communists. The second priest is Father Bovard who has spent over twenty-five years in China and who is absolutely shattered when he discovers that members of his parish community have become Communists.
The third part of the novel focuses on Ho San who after having been raised in the mission orphanage then became a Communist leader and made the the two priests prisoners. Ho San ultimately is the character in the novel who makes the most important decision; that is to say, he chooses to sacrifice his life to create a diversion that will allow O'Banion and Bovard to flee to safety outside of China. Thus the two priest who appeared at the outset to be the primary protagonists arerelegated at the end of the novel the roles of secondary characters. To make matters worse, Ho San is a very flawed hero. At one point he hero as he rapes a young Chinese woman convert because of her loyalty to father O'Banion.
"Satan never Sleeps" appears inauthentic to the reader. The characters seem false and the author fails to make it clear who the chief protagonist is. This novel is a great disappointment and far below the level that I had expected from Buck.

[Boshra]

ناخواسته با نسل اژدها و موج بزرگ مقایسه اش میکردم و در برابر اون ها خیلی حرفی برای گفتن نداشت. شاید یه علتش این باشه که شخصیت های اصلی اون کتاب ها شرقی ان و در این کتاب ایرلندی. در مجموع نه انقدری که دوست داشتم انقلاب چین رو دیدم نه چینی هارو.
بیشتر در نکوهش قانون تجرد کاتولیک ها بود تا انقلاب چین.

[Martina]

This small, riveting book was made into a play. I could not put it down! But of course it was Pearl Buck, my favorite author!

[Chris]

Pearl S. Buck may have written some important novels in her day, but I can't say I like the prose or the stories of any that I've read. This is interesting, at least, in its set-up, as I have read almost nothing about the Communist Revolution in China, and had not thought about the plights of people who had lived there who were not Communists. However, the story is sort of toneless and ignorantly religious in a certain way. The priests insistence that characters must recognize sin when those same characters have renounced, or never known about, religion, is frustrating to say the least. Likewise, their blame of women for luring them into sinfulness. Likewise, their insistence that Siu-Lan marry the man that raped her. Whether it's the ignorance of the characters, or Buck's own beliefs, it is hard to say. In any case, I wasn't into it.

[John]

SATAN NEVER SLEEPS is a solid read, but a little lightweight considering the subject matter and the pedigree of the book's author. The story is that of two devout priests in China being harassed by communist soldiers who view the Church as a threat to the sovereignty of the State. Meanwhile, the younger of the two priests is forced to deal with his feelings for a young Chinese woman who hopes to entice him along the path to romance. The story is intriguing, but it's very difficult to empathize with any of the characters, and the ending is largely unsatisfying. It's well-written, but doesn't live up to Pearl Buck's literary reputation.

[Debra]

This book was more like a long "short" story. 120 pages. The book was published in 1962 and is about two priests getting stuck in China when the "Reds" start to take over. The captor is a young man they practically raised and who was to become a priest. Involves a young woman who thinks she is in love with one of the priests.
Interesting in some ways, but would have probably been better if twice as long. Strangely enough, it was made into a movie starring Robert Holden.

[Soham]

A miraculous find in the deteriorating remains of my late grandfather's library - I have no idea how a Hindi literature professor ended up in possession of a 60s propaganda piece. It gave me a chance to read a story (and watch a movie) that I otherwise would have gone a lifetime without knowing about. Perhaps all one can really hope for in death is to share a story with those who come after through our possessions.

[Claire]

Curious little book, quick page-turner, but story and morals perhaps 'of it's time'.

[Leslie]

Another outstanding book by one of my favorite authors; Pearl S. Buck. This book was filled with drama, history, innocence and love.

[Mahsa]

نسل اژدها توقعاتم رو بالا برده بود که متاسفانه تو این کتاب چیز زیادی ندیدم.

[J.D. G]

This review is based on the film. It was appallingly racist and sexist in depiction by promoting white male saviourism through shallow tropes.

[Mark Ray]

One of her later works, after she returned to the States. Insightful treatment of two Catholic priests caught up in the chaos of the Chinese Civil War. The clash of culture and morality plays out amidst the people the two priests had influenced over the years; from young leaders that took up Communism to a young devoted woman convert. Comes to a dramatic climactic ending.

[John]

I refuse to believe that Pearl Buck wrote this. It was terrible. I am used to always giving her books at least 4 stars and to know that I have just received a dozen of her books from Ebay at not too low of a price either, I am very disappointed. I sure hope this will turn out to be an exception.

[Ana]

what the hell 🔥🔥