SOURCE: “Truth Opium and Muddy Waters,” in New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, p. 2.

In the following review, Winks attempts to identify Mo's purpose and achievement in An Insular Possession.

Timothy Mo has sent his craft up a crowded river. A few years ago C. Mary Turnball, a historian at the University of Hong Kong, charted the many novels set in Hong Kong and found well over a hundred. Most, she thought, were of little account, though the public obviously thought differently of the panoramas offered by James Clavell, whose Tai-Pan, published in 1966, sprawls across much the same riverscape as Mr. Mo’s remarkable effort, An Insular Possession. Mr. Clavell was never content to let his ship slide into quiet waters, however, and in the end he was false to the history he tried to tell. Mr. Mo is more confident, his hand steady on the tiller, his...