The Flowers of War by Yan Geling translated by Nicky Harman Harvill Secker
The Flowers of War comes in a striking cover. In the foreground, one of those familiar images from Shanghai advertising posters of the 1930s, a pretty girl with arched eyebrows and Cupid's-bow lipstick stares out with a winsome smile. In the blood-red background, you can make out soldiers in a trench and a pagoda. Beneath the title are the words 'The book behind Zhang Yimou's epic film'.
The novel tells a story of the fall of Nanking in 1937. In the compound of an American church, a dozen bewildered Chinese schoolgirls have been given sanctuary by the priest, Father Engelmann, and his deacon, a young Westerner who has been brought up as a Chinese. Outside the compound walls, the city is given over to lawlessness, starvation and the marauding of the occupying Japanese army.
Engelmann is desperate to preserve the neutrality of the church compound, and thus protect the girls, but he cannot turn away others who come seeking refuge: first a Chinese officer whose unit has surrendered, then a group of refugee prostitutes and finally two wounded soldiers who have escaped being massacred.
The schoolgirls are housed in the attic, and the prostitutes are hidden in the cellar. The teenage girls despise and resent the new arrivals. Supplies are running low, the news from outside is terrifying, and it is inevitable that the church compound cannot escape the attention of the Japanese army for long.
It is a fictional situation that certainly has plenty of potential. But Yan Geling's novel - a long short story, really - is oddly listless until the pace picks up in the final quarter.