[In Noble House] James Clavell has given us a game or two to play. The first is called pick-the-hero and it isn't so easy because both candidates wear white hats bespattered with the grey mud of Hong Kong. (p. 61)

But let's leave that game for a moment and get on with the next. It's the easier pastime of pick-the-genre, and any answer out of four or five choices is correct. Squeezed into the course of 10 days in Hong Kong in 1963, Noble House is an espionage novel along the lines of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, dealing with KGB and Communist Chinese infiltration of British government and business…. There's also a 19th-century Trollope-style chronicle of the manners, mores, business and politics of the embattled British ruling class of Hong Kong. Then there's the pot-boiling dynasty novel, with the Gornt-Dunross rivalry carried out of Clavell's earlier historical best seller Tai-Pan. And...