Reviews
John Reeves was the British consul in neutral Macau throughout the Second World War. Officially, he reported to Chungking, but in fact he was on his own representing Britain in a very hostile environment. He was utterly unprepared. He had served as vice-consul for five years in Hankow and Mukden, but had little Mandarin, and no Cantonese or Portuguese. In the years after the invasion of Hong Kong, Macau was eventually flooded with more than 5000 refugees with some claim to British Empire citizenship, most of them destitute. Reeves was able to house them (after a fashion) in derelict factories and warehouses, and he was able to procure a precarious supply of rice and vegetables from China, but only through the good offices of wanted pirates and smugglers. He didn't hesitate. Though completely unprepared for his responsibilities, Reeves got the job done. He had a good war.
Reeves wrote a memoir of his adventures which was never published until the Royal Asiatic Society and Hong Kong University Press resurrected it in 2014. In The Good War of Consul Reeves, Peter Rose has built on that account, but supplemented it with extensive research in the UK National Archives. He describes his creation as a work of historical fiction, though he says he tried to hew to the historical facts as best he could.
Rose tells three parallel tales of Reeves' adventures. One is of an insecure personality who rises to the challenge of wartime and does heroic work literally saving the lives of hundreds of refugees and substantially aiding thousands.
The second is of an insecure personality with a failed marriage and a disabled daughter. The wife and daughter were trapped in Hong Kong by the Japanese invasion. With the help of the neutral Portuguese, Reeves manages to extract them from internment and bring them to Macau, and then does his best for them throughout the war. But his wife remains estranged and leaves him permanently as soon as she can get transport to Britain after the Japanese surrender.
Rose portrays Reeves as visiting prostitutes and dabbling in opium in reaction, but in that he is presumably taking a little excursion from the records. Reeves is unlikely to have left evidence of either practice in his memoir or in the Consular Service archives. Rose has also used the Consular Service archives to construct a third tale of bureaucratic animosity to Reeves's achievements. In normal circumstances, a vice-consul does not have the authority to accomplish what Reeves accomplished, and Rose paints a picture of professional jealousy among his superiors in Chungking. That tale too is questionable. Reeves was, after all, appointed a full consul, supported (via Lisbon) with ₤1.75 million in his refugee work (which he accounted for down to the nearest avo), honored with an OBE and posted to Rome after the war. His good war was clearly good for him professionally.
But those embellishments help Rose's account of Reeves's wartime adventures to appeal on several levels. It's strongly recommended.
John Pownall Reeves, who died in 1978, was a minor member of the British China Consul Service who was catapulted by accident into one of the most unique postings in history. He was sent almost as an afterthought to the Portuguese colony of Macau, across the mouth of the Pearl River from Hong Kong, to fill a position that had been vacant and ignored for decades. Then, when the Japanese suddenly burst across Asia in 1941, he found himself His Majesty's only representative within thousands of kilometers in an overcrowded, spy-ridden city controlled by the Portuguese, who never chose a side in the war and which thus was never invaded by any of the combatants.
There are varying accounts of whether Reeves, Cambridge graduate and son of modest parentage, was up to the job. He would ultimately be awarded the OBE by the British government in 1946 and was feted by the Portuguese for his work but he seemed a forlorn figure. After the war – when he would send his wife and child back to the UK and never see them again – he was posted to war-ravaged areas of Italy, and then to Surabaya where he would finish his diplomatic career, eventually dying in South Africa, where he had retired. To Peter Rose, a most unlikely novelist, he and Macau would be a rewarding area of focus and, for those of us who knew pre-1997 Macau, a pleasurable subject. Rose, a lawyer, was Asia head of public affairs for the Goldman Sachs investment bank when he grew fascinated with Macau, traveling to the then-colony frequently and studying its history. The Good War of Consul Reeves is the result, his first novel. It was a worthy venture indeed, and engagingly accurate historically.
Reeves, in Rose's telling, would be at home with Alden Pyle, James Wormold or Holly Martens, solitary and ill at ease, a drinker saddled with a frigid and distant wife and an apparently autistic child, forgotten in remote and meaningless consular jobs in Mukden and Hankow before he is posted to Macau as an accident because the consular service doesn't want to grant him home leave and so uses the Portuguese enclave as a place to stick him. During the war, Macau's population would burgeon from 150,000 to 300,000, with the increase almost entirely refugees, largely from China but also from Hong Kong. A smattering of American and British troops would also find haven in Macau, to be sent on their way through Reeves' network. The Portuguese governor, Gabriel Maurício Teixeira, welcomed refugees, despite the fact that virtually all food, fuel, and other resources would have to be smuggled in. Apparently, for his effort – and, in Rose's telling, despite the amity of the Japanese consul and the colony's neutrality – the Japanese put a £4000 bounty on Reeves's head, requiring protection from plain-clothed troops and his own paid bodyguard, probably triads.
Despite his apparent lack of aptitude, Reeves and Macau would meet as the right man and the right place. He would make allegiance with Chinese gangsters to feed and care for thousands of refugees with British citizenship or nationality from across the river in Hong Kong, smuggle out hundreds from Japanese-controlled areas, run his own spy rings in a city piled with the starved, and occasionally murdered dead while the British colonial headquarters in Chongqing regarded him as little more than a nuisance.
Along the way, Rose gives us a picture of Macau the way it was, and the way it largely remained until 1997 when the Chinese allowed US gaming interests to build gigantic gambling halls to invite millions of Chinese punters – a Macau that many of us are nostalgic for, with its pace so much slower than Hong Kong's, once with its tree-lined praya grande, the European-style road that hugged the sea, its restaurants where one could linger for hours drinking vinho verde while the staff snoozed at a back table. Along the way, there are cameo appearances by the likes of Wong Kong Kit, a triad gangster before and during the war, Stanley Ho Hung-sun, come to give Reeves a bottle of whiskey, the Japanese consul, Fukui Yasumitsu and Emily Hahn, the beauteous American novelist and adventuress who captivated Hong Kong with her scandalous behavior, among others. In both Rose's telling and in real life, it was a city rife with spies, gangsters, refugees, and people on the run.
According to the historical record, Reeves would be perceived by his superiors as overstepping, particularly with regard to his attempts to run spy networks separately from the British Army Aid Group. In Rose's hands, Reeves' superiors in Chongqing simply hardly noticed he was there. He apparently was also regarded as indiscreet, not hard to do in a British foreign service in which a smile at the wrong juncture could almost blemish a career. Rose gives him a sympathetic portrayal, and by most yardsticks, he seems to deserve it. It is a book of both literary and historic interest. There are other source materials including his own memoir of the Macau years, The Lone Flag, which he completed in 1949 although the Foreign Office refused permission for publication. It was eventually published in 2014. He is an intriguing character in British colonial history, and Rose has done us a favor with this portrayal. Not bad for an investment banker!