The Willow Woman - Laurence Westwood

The Willow Woman is a detective story set in China, following the long tradition of Chinese detective novels. It follows homicide detective Phillip Ye as he investigates a case of police brutality and a missing person, that quickly gets deeper and deeper.

The Chinese have a long, long tradition of detective novels. The tradition goes all the way back to the Tang Dynasty, (618 - 907 CE) - that's nearly 1500 years of detective stories! It a rich cultural phenomenon, and the typical Chinese crime novel has certain shapes and characteristics that define it as following the tradition. The author, Laurence Westwood has good blog post on them here. In The Willow Woman, Laurence has stuck to the traditions, taking the lessons of over a thousand years of history, but moulded them to fit the tastes of western readers, and the result is a great, great book.

The story opens with Phillip Ye, a homicide detective in Chengdu and son of the former mayor. He sees an apparition in his room telling him to travel to certain area of the town, which he does. While he's there he witnesses a case of police brutality, ending up in the murder of an elderly man - a case that he takes on and starts to look into, and it leads him to a missing person case, which leads him on to more and more mysteries in Chengdu's underbelly. There's a lot more in here than that simple explanation - the cast of characters is absolutely huge for a novel this size, so there's many sub plots orbiting around this central case. Laurence has woven a web in The Willow Woman - and a masterful one at that.

I'm no expert in Chinese culture by any means. I don't know how the society works, or what the common understandings of Chinese people are. I certainly know nothing about the legal system there. So this book was intimidating. In the first few pages there's a cast of characters that is a few pages long, full of names which were unusual to me. How on earth am I going to get through this and make sense of it all? How am I going to remember Superintendent Zuo from Superintendent Ye, or Prosecutor Deng from Prosecutor Ya? Luckily, Laurence does seem to be an expert on these things, and the book manages to make everything clear to the English reader, without becoming patronising. The tradition of Chinese Crime novels is to explain everything to reader, leaving little to the imagination, and this book fills the gaps where my English understanding reaches it's limits. Laurence is English, but is an expert on the Chinese legal system and Chinese culture, so he knows where he needs to explain the cultural differences. Sometimes, reading a book set in a different culture, especially if the author is from that culture, so doesn't have an outsider perspective, can make things confusing - the author can assume things are common knowledge that simply aren't outside of their own culture. Happily this isn't the case here. The Willow Woman throws you straight into Chengdu, but Laurence is your tour guide.

This is a great detective novel. The plot is good, fast paced with a few curve balls and surprises here and there. Laurence's writing is fantastic. I think this is his second book, but the prose and the narrative feels like a writer with much more experience. This one is strongly recommended.