SOURCE: Review of The Monkey King in Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 5, 1987, p. 11.

In the following review, Feldman looks at the literary antecedent of The Monkey King and discusses the intricacies of the novel.

One of China's most famous and best-loved novels, the 16th-Century Journey to the West, recounts the larger-than-life, picaresque adventures of the legendary Monkey King as he wends his way toward enlightenment via heaven, hell and all manner of earthly places in between. Timothy Mo, the Oxford-educated son of an English mother and Cantonese father who now lives and writes in London, let his imagination journey eastward to 1950s Hong Kong and to Chinese folk tradition for inspiration in his first novel, The Monkey King. So consciously to evoke comparison with one of China’s most popular and enduring works of fiction in other hands could have been courting disaster. But, like its illustrious...