Taiwan

by Christopher Wood

Book by Wood, Christopher

Genres: Fiction

256 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 14, 1981

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Christopher Hovelle Wood was an English screenwriter and novelist, best known for the Confessions series of novels and films which he wrote as Timothy Lea. Under his own name, he adapted two James Bond novels for the screen: The Spy Who Loved Me (1977, with Richard Maibaum) and Moonraker (1979).
Wood's many novels divide into four groups: semi-autobiographical literary fiction, historical fiction, adventure novels, and pseudonymous humorous erotica.

Reviews

[James Amoateng · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lee Fon Yu was a man with a price on his head. Ryman was bored with his job. Crosby had been sacked from his job. Flower was a whore. Burton was in love with Flower. They conspire and steal three million dollars worth of artifacts from the National Palace Museum of Taiwan. Escape to sell the goods to a man called Biggs who had a museum on a boat. The adventures take them on a hard and tortuous journey through the South China sea. There is treachery and betrayal all the way. I forgot the time while reading the book. Excellent adventure novel!

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The death of the snakes was horrible." And so begins this unintentionally hilarious book for anyone who knows anything about Taiwan (or Singapore, for that matter). Taiwan is certainly a worthy setting for several good adventure/crime stories (including Francie Lin's The Foreigner), but none of them should involve wild, running gunfights across the island (much less anti-tank rockets in Singapore), since both places in the late 70's had strict martial law governments where even owning a gun was punishable with long prison terms.

Wood (who also wrote the screenplay for "Moonraker," widely considered the worst James Bond movie ever, as well as what Wikipedia refers to as "pseudononymous humorous erotica") obviously spent time in Taiwan doing research, which he shows off with unnecessary lists of food and locations. But it's equally obvious he didn't spend enough time to avoid numerous painful mistakes in his use of Chinese phrases and names, (i.e., throughout the book he refers to Taiwan's locally made Yue Loong cars as "Yue Looney"). Indeed, the cover art is a good representation of what's in store in terms of inaccuracies, since it shows the type of stereotypical Chinese junks and sampans that haven't been seen in Taiwan since the early 1900s.

Altogether, this isn't a terrible book -- it's a passably escapist heist story -- and as noted, for anyone who knows East Asia well it's an unintentional hoot. Only published in England (no surprise), I first picked up a copy in Hong Kong back in the early 80's but reread (and perversely enjoyed) it again now on a plane trip back to Singapore. It's available used on Amazon.uk -- but read it at your own risk!

[James Cripps · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not a big reader of fiction so for me I thought this book was pretty good. A third of the way in it becomes a non stop action movie and being set in Taiwan makes it all the more interesting. Hard to visualise some of the action sequences though.