FictionReviewA fictional biography of Pearl Buck is a wasted opportunity, says Julia Lovell

The life of Pearl Buck, a missionary's daughter whose Chinese sagas made her a bestselling author and Nobel laureate, seems to beg for novelistic treatment. Anchee Min's well-meaning fictional biography of the writer sets out to be an epic of modern China told through an imagined friendship between Buck and a Chinese woman called Willow; disappointingly, it deteriorates into an exotic jumble of hastily sketched characters and ill-digested Chinese history.

Born in rural south-eastern China around 1890, Willow is the daughter of an over-privileged ne'er-do-well who, after bankrupting the clan through his extravagance, survives by thieving from his neighbours. Aged eight, Willow becomes a pickpocket herself, and it is through stealing the wallet of the local missionary that she is eventually befriended by his daughter, Pearl.

In time, Pearl and Willow migrate to the nearby cities of Shanghai and Nanjing to begin new lives as modern, educated women. After the man with whom they have both fallen in love (the celebrated modern poet Hsu Chih-mo) chooses Pearl, Willow consoles herself by marrying a tough communist apparatchik called Dick. Pearl leaves China before the communist victory in 1949, while Willow remains to endure the political horrors of Maoism. Finally, after the deaths of both Mao and Pearl, a nonagenarian Willow makes a pilgrimage to America to scatter Chinese earth over Pearl's grave.

The first third of the book – which trots along at a respectable pace through Willow's and Pearl's picaresque early childhoods – has plenty of charm, with mutual incomprehension between earnest missionaries and bemused Chinese villagers providing nice flashes of humour. Looking at a picture of a heavily bearded Jesus, Willow's father objects that "no Chinese would worship a god that looked like a monkey".

After about 10 years of this, though, the book becomes a rather breathless sprint through 20th-century China. Anchee Min seems determined to drag her characters to the centre of almost every major political event of the period: the nationalist and communist revolutions, the civil war, high-level Maoist power struggles. Twice – in high melodramatic style – the book's characters are rescued from certain death by absurd coincidences. By the novel's halfway point, key relationships are not making a great deal of sense.

The book is tonally inconsistent, too, veering between fortune-cookie wisdom ("the fisherman profits when a crab and a lobster are locked in a fight"), chick-lit repartee ("As long as you are in the picture," Willow tells Pearl, "I don't stand a chance with Hsu Chih-mo"), valley-girl vernacular ("oh my God," exclaims young, Protestant Pearl) and historical cribs.

If you're looking for insight into Buck's extraordinary life, you should probably read Hilary Spurling's new biography. If you want to know more about Maoist China, you could try Anchee Min's own autobiographical account, Red Azalea (among many fine books). For understandable logistical reasons, the market share of Chinese writing in English translation has long been dwarfed by that of China-related novels and memoirs written directly into English: few editors have the time and knowhow to grapple with the mass of work published in Chinese. But when a book is as hit-and-miss as this one, it can't help but seem a wasted opportunity.

The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China, translated by Julia Lovell, is published by Penguin Classics.

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