Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.
“LES CONQUERANTS” by ANDRE MALRAUX (published in the original French in 1928; published in English in the 1950s as “The Conquerors”)
Those who regularly read this blog will be aware that I have a particular interest in French literature (as well as English, American and other literatures of course). In fact I have written on this blog so many reviews of the works of Honore de Balzac that I have got sick of writing about him. And many readers have got sick of him too. So when I turn to another well-known French novelist, Andre Malraux, I assure you that I am writing about a very different kettle of fish. Georges Andre Malraux (1901-1976) had parents who didn't really like the name Georges and they dropped it early in his life. He wrote only five novels, but he wrote many dozens of non-fiction works, mainly about art (especially Asian art) and politics. His most famous novel is La Condition Humaine, more widely read than all his other novels. He won many awards in France, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt, and was a number of times nominated for the Nobel Prize - but he never won it. He is esteemed by some as a man of action. He flew fighter-planes against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was part of the Resistance in France in the Second World War. But he was [and still is] a very controversial person in France. Leaving hard socialism behind him, he allied himself with General de Gaulle towards the end of the Second World War. In due course, when de Gaulle became president, Malraux was made Minister for the Arts and Culture. From the left, many negative books about him have been written in France since he died.
As I’ve often said, I sometimes choose “Something Old” books to review because they have sat naggingly unread on my shelves and I want to stop them nagging. I read - with difficulty - the famous La Condition Humaine years ago but had forgotten most of it and I have some other novels by Malraux on my shelves. So for the next five or six postings, I will deal with Malraux’s four best novels [not his non-fiction] and with what other people have written about him.
Some biographies falsely say that Malraux’s first novel was La Tentation de I’Occident, published in 1926. But this is not really true. La Tentation de I’Occident is a polemic, presented as a conversation between a Chinese man and a European man weighing up their different cultures. Its basic idea was that (post-war i.e. after the First World War) Europe was exhausted and had lost faith, while China and the East had yet to fulfil their destiny. Much dialogue is there but it is not really a novel. It was published serially as essays and “think pieces”.
So to Malraux’s first real novel Les Conquerants published in 1928. It is a very political novel and is still much prized by left-wing readers and even by some Communists, although if they read it more carefully they would realize that Malraux is very ambiguous in his politics. Les Conquerants could mean the European colonialists who had conquered empires in Asia (especially the English, French and Dutch). Or it could just as well refer to the feuding Chinese political factions that went to war with one other, each seeking dominance – in other words, conquerors. The novel is set in Canton in China in 1925. The Boxer Rebellion and China’s emperor are long in the past. China is now a republic inaugurated by Sun Yat-sen, whom both the Kuomintang [Nationalist] and the Communists revere. But Sun Yat-sen has died . And in China there are still the remnants of petty warlords trying to dominate distant regions. The Kuomintang are allowing Communists to join them, but there are tensions between them. Chiang Kai-shek is accepting arms and other help from Stalin. He is also becoming a dictator.
Andre Malraux narrates the story in the first person – the voice of a European. Some have taken this to be the voice of Malraux himself, and maybe he hoped that readers would take that to be the case. But the fact is that when he wrote the novel, Malraux had himself been to China only on two very brief visits. He knew very well South-East Asia [Indo-China], hanging out especially in Hanoi in what was then a French colonial possession. His novel was written from his very. brief exposure to China, his knowledge of history and what he had picked up from newspapers and other information.
So to a synopsis. The Comintern [the international Communist Party, organised by Russia] want to prevent British goods coming through Hong Kong and flooding the markets at the expense of Chinese goods and their workers. Many Chinese agree with this idea. Most of the Kuomintang disagree and this gives the dominant Kuomintang military figure Chiang Kai-shek the opportunity to call on European help. There are also protests against the “Bund” in Shanghai, which allows Europeans to have privileges and work Chinese as coolies and cheep labour. In this novel, Chinese see the British as the most villainous of European interlopers. In Hong Kong and in the “Bund”, the British can try Chinese in British courts. But Malraux is not so naive as to think that only the British exploited China; and his unidentified narrator makes some harsh comments about French colonisers too.
In the midst of this tension, there is a major strike in Canton, encouraged by the Communists, which Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang tries to put down. But the strikers hold out for nearly 30 months. Much of the novel charts the progress of the strike and how violence increases. Many pages are spent in conversations about how a major Communist uprising could improve China. Many pages are spent on strategy, and on using propaganda to bring the proletarians to the Communist cause. We are given bulletins, month by month, of how the strike is getting on and how many people have died. There is much blood spilled.
All this may sound very impersonal, and indeed the novel is very impersonal. But there are some outstanding [fictitious ] characters. Very violent is Tang, a former warlord who has become a strike-breaker and general thug. More important are two European characters, Garine and Borodine – both Communists but with very different temperaments. Garine has some Russian forebears, but was raised and mainly lived in Switzerland and was not in Russia at the time of the Russian revolution. He wants to have an all-out Chinese revolution… in effect being an idealist who does not grasp the fact that revolutions cannot succeed by one single push. Yet he is still a pessimist. [Some critics have suggested that Garine is in part based on Malraux himself.] Quite different in temperatment is Borodine, a Russian who dutifully follows orders as given by the Comintern. He organizes propaganda in China and, on the orders of Stalin, he wants to make a compromise with the Kuomintang, meaning that his strategy would be to gradually and bit-by-bit infiltrate the Kuomintang with Communists until it could be taken over. [By the way, Mao Tse-tung – or Mao Zedung if you prefer – is hardly mentioned in this novel as he was not yet a major figure.] Early in the novel, there is a conversation in which both Garine and Borodine are compared . Garine is characterised thus: “C’est un homme capable d’action. A I’occasion” - while Borodine is said to attract “revolutionnaires professionels, pour que la Chine est une matiere premiere.”
It is ironical - and Malraux must have been aware of it - that in this novel the major characters are European, Garine, Borodine and the anonymous narrator ; while the Chinese are mainly an anonymous proletarian mass. Les Conquerants sold very well in France when it was first published. It was seen as contemporary reportage. But it was banned in Russia and was also banned in Mussolini’s Italy. Totalitarian states tend to shut down books that raise complex issues. In France, some Communists where interested by the novel, but others damned it for including a wish-washy comrade like Garine who wasn’t following the party line.
Although Les Conquerants is overwhelmingly a chronicle of events and is concerned with politics, it is written in clear and very readable prose. This, as you will soon discover, is not the case with Malraux’s next novel La Voie Royale, which is over-cooked with description and often crumbles into vague and unreadable prose. Too much preciosity, mon ami. It has been suggested that La Voie Royale was in fact written before Les Conquerants, as it concerns events that happened in Malraux's life before he became very interest in China. But this idea has been debunked.
On the whole, Les Conquerants is really a prelude to Malraux's best-known novel La Condition Humaine (published in 1933) which is also set in China during massive unrest. Malraux wrote La Condition Humaine after he had at last really saw China in detail.
Footnote: My “Le livre de poche” edition of Les Conquerants adds a postscript which Malraux wrote twenty years after the novel was first published. By then, the Chinese Civil War was being won by Communists led by Mao Tse-tung, and Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang were driven to Taiwan. And Malraux was moving away from his earlier very left-wing views.
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