MI6 faces an unthinkable task: save Chairman Mao! Author Christopher New has written a thriller around the audacious Project 571, a purported coup plot against Mao by supporters of Vice Chairman Lin Biao that also incorporates the mysterious Lin Biao Incident of September 13, 1971 wherein Biao, along with his wife and son, perished when the aircraft carrying them to safety in the USSR crashed in the hinterlands of Mongolia. The events are still shrouded in mystery, so New has plenty of room for cloak and dagger fictionalization. His tack is to focus on a secret code discovered by MI6 that implicates the USSR in an attempt to depose Mao and redirect China's recent moves to detente with the USA. It's a sort of sick correction to the Sino-Soviet split that would see the People's Republic as a junior partner or client state to the USSR, and the only thing more frightening to our British boys than this outcome is if the plot fails and China falls into a new civil war ... the PRC has only just detonated their first nuclear weapons at their test site in Lop Nur, and the implications of a new nuclear power wracked by coup and counter-coup are terrifying.
New writes his geopolitics in intimate, close scenes, whether we're dealing with Mao's inner circle, the odd man on the street, or the boys in the cryptography department. It's an engrossing style that avoids overburdening us with the usual dramatis personae that can weigh down these kinds of thrillers with lists of bureaucrats and war room attendees, and it gives us an immediacy that levels the characters and allows us to see that even at the highest levels of power the men involved are just that: mortal men, sometimes unsure of themselves, sometimes doubting or afraid. New's Chinese characters are all done in Wade-Giles style by the way, so that'll be Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao throughout, and they'll be operating out of Peking.
The vagueness around Project 571 in English language sources gives New lots of room for suspense despite the ultimate outcome being known, especially when it comes to characters like crank writer and one-time MI6 cryptographer Coomb, now dragged back into the game after decades of anti-nuclear letter campaigns from his self-imposed exile on an island off Hong Kong, where he lives in bitter martyrdom with his Chinese wife and leukemia stricken daughter.
Maybe it's cheeky of New to saddle MI6 with Mao's salvation, or maybe not, but nothing's a sure thing in his story besides his use of repetition - as our characters jet back and forth from Hong Kong to the UK they fly over the plains of India where New tells up repeatedly that "half a million people look up vacantly and starve." As Coomb is sucked into MI6's plans to uncover more of that secret code, we're taken along into that most heartbreaking part of spy fiction, the places where we see human lives ground up by giant unthinking machines, where lives can end with a flick of a wrist leading to a bullet in the head, or not-so-random accidents that demand innocent bystanders suffer for the sake of a coverup that may be forgotten tomorrow. One conspirator dooms himself through a prideful boast, another through his own weak nerves driving him to run even as he knows the KGB is watching. Meanwhile, Coomb drives on to decipher the code, even as his daughter slips away and he spits venom at the government men who so thoughtlessly manage his contacts.
Spoilers ahead for the secret Russian code, so look away if you like to figure that stuff out on your own:
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| I'm no good at cryptography myself |
As we come to the climax New is more interested in the fallout among his characters than the nitty gritty of Project 571, and his brief, uncertain vignettes in the halls of power serve as a reminder that even in this fictional story, the truth is frustratingly hard to grasp.
New's restrained "what-if" writing and sensitive touch earns Goodbye Chairman Mao a sturdy 3/4 rating.
Popular Library, 1980 (original pub 1979)
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