Not for All the Tea in China

Kyril Figlioli explicitly sets out to write a picaresque novel -- the extended title states this clearly: "All the Tea in China which tells how Carolus Mortdecai Van Cleef set out to seek his fortune in London Town; on the High Seas, in India, the treaty ports of China and even in darkest Africa; and how he found it predictably, in a place which has no longitude and precious little latitude."

His protagonist is a young man driven from his home in Holland to make his fortune selling his mother's Delft porcelains. Traveling to England, he befriends another merchant who gets him settled in a shop but who also inadvertently suggests that his china business could flourish if financed through the opium trade. So off to sea.

Okay ... theme set. Now is this a story written in the 19th or 20th Century? Imitation in not in this case high flattery. The book is so formulaic as to be as thin and tattered as a McCall's pattern in a house of six growing girls. Figilioi's introduction of picaresque elements is rote: the seduction of the captain's wife; the duel with the first mate; the encounter with cannibals in Africa. But this is no Mungo Park.

Figlioli writes of Africa: "A trek is like a long sea-voyage but dusty. The dangers are as many but of a different nature: there is little danger of drowning, for instance. The boredom is exactly similar, day follows day in an unchanging pattern, one loses count of time, and after many days on can only recall trivial incidents, small oases in a desert of dullness." An apt summary of the intrigue (or lack thereof) in the entire novel.

All the Tea in China is a prequel to Figlioli's Mortdecai's series of stories. I am not tempted to peruse them. Please, a contemporary picaresque!