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Despite popular sentiments that World War II was in fact a good war, there was some disagreement about that immediately following the conflict. After the Marshall Plan and the "democratization" of Japan, conspiracy mongers accused forces in the U.S. government of assisting our former enemies in rebuilding their economic powers at the expense of our national interest. At their worst, these suspicions aided the rise of McCarthyism; at their best, they give us snappy espionage novels such as James Webb's
The Emperor's General, which speculates that Douglas MacArthur lost the peace by allowing Japan to regain its sphere of influence in the Pacific Rim.
This hypothesis is presented by the book's protagonist, Jay Marsh, an inexperienced captain serving as one of MacArthur's aides. Throughout the course of the novel, young Marsh suspects that the general is shielding Japan's imperial elite from war-crimes trials being undertaken by various military commissions. He soon sheds his naïveté, becoming both seduced and appalled by the Japanese-U.S. alliance of global hegemony. Webb avoids the Grishamesque hit-and-run action sequences that sacrifice the "reality" of many conspiratorial novels, making Marsh into MacArthur's doppelgänger, a character whose intense love of the East is entangled with a sense of compromised honor. The general's loss of the Philippines is matched with Marsh's betrayal of his Filipina fiancée, propelling all the characters towards their destiny. The fact that the U.S. secured its military objectives by protecting Japan's leaders should come as no surprise to the historically informed, but the all too human motivations that Webb gives to MacArthur's actions ought to keep the reader hooked to the last page. --John M. Anderson
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From Publishers Weekly
The collision of love, war and power is explored through the unflinching eyes of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's trusted aide-de-camp in Webb's (Fields of Fire) powerfully compelling and moving new novel. Fighting the Japanese for control of the Philippines during the final months of WWII, the general reveals his military genius and broken heart as he posts his army on the island of Leyte, home of his long-lost lover, Consuelo Trani. Capt. Jay Marsh, MacArthur's 23-year-old aide-de-camp, fluent in Japanese, becomes an envoy to prisoners and to the general's officers, finding his own romance when he meets beautiful Divina Clara. But their marriage is postponed when the atom bomb ends the war, and the Japanese emperor's adviser, Kido, selects Marsh as his conduit in Japan, using him in a complicated plot to protect the emperor and to gain access to MacArthur's strategies. Kido plies Marsh with the favors of a geisha, with whom Marsh embarks on a politically and romantically deceitful entanglement. Meanwhile, MacArthur avenges atrocities in Manila by rigging General Yamashita's trial for war crimes, which plays into the hands of the Japanese royal family; subsequently, he succumbs to a series of labyrinthine alliances and conspiracies that display his weaknesses and complexities. This is historical fiction of a high order. Webb fuses fact and fictional experience through hypnotic storytelling, giving a human face to the victims of war, including its criminals, strategists, heroes and lovers. Towering above them all is the mesmerizing figure of MacArthur, a flawed titan made palpable by Webb, whose appraisal of human nature here proves as vigorous and exemplary as his narrative prowess. Agent, Nick Ellison. BOMC selection; author tour; film rights sold to Scott Rudin/Paramount; foreign rights sold in England, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany, China and France; BDD audio.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
