The Custom House

Description

The central event of Francis King's novel, originally published in 1961, is a savage and seemingly inexplicable murder around which revolves a panorama of life in Japan that is impressive in its complexity and insight. Although The Custom House is in some ways a saddening book, with its recurrent misunderstandings between West and East and its picture of people forever straining to rise above their limitations, it is never solely tragic, flashing through its length with passages of delightful wit and humour. In his central characters-the English teacher, Knox; the pathetic Australian missionary, Welling; Sanae, the Japanese girl with whom he falls in love; Setsuko, one of the `New Women' of Japan, and her uncle, head of a vast cartel and an amateur painter-King displays the penetrating knowledge of motive and character for which he was so often praised. This is a book of a scale and seriousness which few writers would attempt, and the result is not merely a thrilling and intensely vivid picture of post-war Japan but a work of art which digs deeply into universal experience.

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize,the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011. "One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov." Beryl Bainbridge

'Commands not only complete attention, but great respect ... a novel packed with such a mass of well-ordered material that if its form were less elastic it would burst open at the seams ... a rare achievement at the best of times ... an assured artist in command of considerable power.' Penelope Mortimer