SOURCE: “How Not to Write History: Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession,” in Ariel, Vol. 25, No. 3, July 1994, pp. 51-65.

In the following essay, Ho examines the strategies adopted by Mo in his presentation of history in An Insular Possession.

An Insular Possession (1986), Timothy Mo’s third novel, represents a deliberate turning away from the more restricted domestic chronicles of his first two novels, The Monkey King (1978) and Sour Sweet (1982). Its subject matter, Sino-British conflict that led to the founding of Hong Kong as a city port by British imperialist forces in the Far East in the nineteenth century, is epical in scope. It resonates of Virgil’s epic on the origins of Rome, but at the same time it sounds a recurrent note of ironic revision. The American nationality of the protagonists places them as outsiders to the Sino-British conflict and suggests history written from the vantage point...