Books I Didn't Finish: Shogun

So recently a TV adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 doorstopper Shogun came out and was extremely well-received by critics and audiences. I tried watching it and didn’t like it for reasons that I might get to another day, but it reminded me that I had the novel sitting on my Kindle. Why not give it a whirl?

The books turned out to be more compelling than I had expected, but its crushing length eventually wore down my enthusiasm to finish (this is a criticism I have often received myself) and I gave up halfway through. Let’s dig into the specifics and ask the question, are some books just too damn long? Why didn’t you edit this, James Clavell’s publisher?

Shogun is set in Shakespeare Times, when the golden age of European exploration is coming to a close and the golden age of European colonialism is beginning. The existence and general whereabouts of Japan is known to all, but only the mighty Spanish Empire has pinned down its exact location, giving them a monopoly on the rich trade and possible future conquests contained therein. All of that changes when our hero John Blackthorne, English pilot of a Dutch privateer vessel, washes ashore following a disastrous Pacific crossing.

As luck would have it, Blackthorne has arrived right as a simmering conflict between the opposing lords Toranaga and Ishido is about to come to a boil, and the stash of five hundred modern European guns that he’s brought with him (plus the hands-on experience required to teach Samurai how to use them effectively) might be just the thing to get Toranaga out of the corner he’s been backed into. Why, it might even be enough to secure him the titular position of Shogun! This is easier said than done however due to rampant treachery, political backstabbing, Blackthorne’s own patriotic agenda, and the machinations of the Portuguese Jesuits, who have managed to secure sole political access to the sympathetic Daimyos and aren’t too thrilled about a ship full of Protestants rolling in and ruining their sweet deal.

So I’ve never read one of these “white guy has adventures in Foreign” stories before, and I’m aware that the genre can be a bit of a minefield for a modern reader. Whether or not Shogun steps on any of those particular mines—or is historically accurate, for that matter—isn’t really something I’m qualified to comment on. I will say that I went in with pretty low expectations given the direction that stories about white dudes in Asia tend to go in, but the half of the book I read was actually not nearly as horny as I was expecting. Yes, Japanese people think our protagonist’s dick is astonishingly huge (of course), but even that scene is played for laughs, mostly at Blackthorne’s expense, so I didn’t get the impression I was reading someone’s weaboo sex fantasy like I often have when seeing Japan viewed through the western lens.

It helps that although Blackthorne is the principal viewpoint character, you could make a convincing argument that Toranaga is the actual protagonist of the story (the TV series seems to go all-in on this angle). The book uses a floating POV that’s free to jump between characters from paragraph to paragraph—not a technique I’m usually fond of, but in this case I think the story would have been impossible to tell otherwise—which means we probably spend as much time in the heads of the Japanese cast as we do Blackthorne’s. This is very much a story that was already happening before Blackthorne showed up, and the fact that he ends up playing a pivotal role in it is largely due to him happening to show up where and when he did, rather than because he’s just intrinsically that awesome.

Not that he isn’t awesome, mind you. In fact large stretches of the book consist of episodic adventures where Blackthorne goes to a place and does something awesome, and then he sees some samurai doing something awesome, and then Blackthorne and the samurai stare at each other with grudging admiration (or barely-concealed lust if the other person is a woman) and muse about how maybe these heathen barbarians from a foreign land aren’t sub-human savages after all.

This happens a lot. A whole lot. Over and over again. More on that in a second.

This highly malleable viewpoint doesn’t just soften the colonial fantasy undertones of the premise; it’s also used to great practical effect. The one area where the book absolutely excels is in building dense political gordian knots of intrigue, sabotage and diplomacy, where you’ll have five people in a room who are all pretending to be on the same side, but they’ve all secretly got multiple different agendas going on that they’re trying to advance without letting the other people know that that’s what they’re doing. Many of these gambits spiral into entertainingly byzantine “I can’t let him know that I know he knows what I’m planning” multi-scheme pileups, and that’s even without accounting for the language barrier (sometimes as many as four simultaneous language barriers, between Japanese, Portuguese, English and Latin) complicating things, either unintentionally or via deliberate obfuscation.

This is all enormous fun to read, but it’s also where the book starts stumbling. With so many characters having their own personal agendas and character arcs and all of them potentially being point of view characters, plus the necessity to have conversations filtered through multi-lingual interpreters, conversations can quickly balloon in length and complexity. This would have been unavoidable even had the book been edited down to the bone, but unfortunately that was not the case.

Simply put, a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes go on for far longer than they need to to—and there are a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes. People take twice as long to say what they’re trying to say as they should, there’s frequent stops and starts for exposition or asides, plus interjections with what everyone is thinking, plus information that’s repeated for no reason.

These must have been enormously complex scenes to plot and write, and on one hand it’s to Clavell’s credit as an author that they came out functional at all. But on the other hand, you can tell he struggled with them, and I really think they needed to be cleaned up for the sake of the novel as a whole.

Things unfortunately don’t get any better with the action scenes, which aren’t frequent but drag on like the third act of a B-tier Marvel movie when they do happen. At one point there’s a daring night-time flight from Osaka castle, which turns into a samurai battle, which turns into a battle on a boat, which turns into a tense stand-off with the crew of a Portuguese warship, which…

At first it’s thrilling, as the book constantly ups the stakes and throws in new complications, but it goes on for chapter after chapter and eventually you’ve worked out how things are going to shake out and you just want to see what happens next.

All of this would be tolerable if the overall plotting was leaner and faster, but the same pacing issues and bloat crop up there as well. Clavell seems to have decided that in order to keep the reader engaged, Blackthorne had to be in constant mortal peril. Over and over again Blackthorne falls ass-backwards into some new situation where a samurai or the Jesuits or whoever wants him dead, he manages to barely survive by the skin of his teeth and it seems like his position is secure, but oh no, it turns out there’s another samurai who wants him dead or Toranaga is fucking with him or maybe the Jesuits are trying to kill him again and in fact, his life still hangs precariously in the balance!

The thing about mortal peril is that it eventually gets old, especially if it’s happening to the protagonist, who you know full well isn’t going to die when you’re not even halfway through the book. It becomes obvious fairly early on that Blackthorne is going to end up training Toranaga’s soldiers for the war with Ishido, and the book is constantly teasing you that now he’s reached a point of equilibrium where he can start doing that and the political storyline will start moving forward…but oh no, someone’s trying to kill him or test him or is just fucking with him again! How will Blackthorne get out of this jam???

By the time I got to the point where the overarching story was finally moving forward, I no longer cared. My interest in continuing with the book didn’t survive for much longer after that. It doesn’t help that the writing is never more than functional, or that Blackthorne himself isn’t a particularly compelling main character.