'Shanghai Station': Revenge and living large in 1918 Shanghai

The life of Bartle Bull is as interesting and varied as anything he has ever written. Born in London, educated at Harvard and Oxford, he is the former publisher of The Village Voice, a writer, lawyer and adventurer, member of the Explorer's Club and the Royal Geographic Society, and a lifelong student of Africa and the China Coast.

He wrote "Safari: A Chronicle of Adventure," followed by a trilogy of novels about Africa from 1935 to 1942: "The White Rhino Hotel," "A Café on the Nile" and "The Devil's Oasis."

In his latest book, "Shanghai Station," Bull has departed Africa for Shanghai and left his British, Goan and Cairean characters behind. More's the pity. The Shanghai characters are all one-dimensional, while the trilogy characters are edgy and eccentric and downright goofy sometimes.

It is 1918 and Shanghai is alive with an assortment of many cultures, some of them on a collision course. Aristocratic Alexander Karlov is driven out of Russia, with his mother and twin sister, by the Bolshevik Revolution. They leave for Shanghai to meet their husband and father, Count Karlov. On the way, a ruthless Russian commissar, Viktor Polyak, kills Alexander's mother and kidnaps his sister.

As Alexander and his father struggle to establish themselves in Shanghai, they are both motivated by revenge against Polyak. They start a fencing and riding academy which attracts young Japanese men and other Russian émigrés from the French Concession. The Count has extravagant habits, and the pair soon find themselves deeply in debt to a Shanghai Triad leader known as "Big Ear."

Matters proceed predictably, except for the gratuitous inclusion of two disparate women: Mei-lan, a keeper of Shanghai's secrets as well as a first-rate brothel, and Jessica James, improbably known as Jesse, the rebellious daughter of missionaries whose naiveté causes no end of trouble for herself and Alexander.

This is not Bull's best effort, but his compendious knowledge of fencing, Mongolian ponies, Shanghai's streets, the diversions of a brothel and the finer points of torture are worth the reader's time.