Book review: The Emperor Of The City’s post-apocalyptic world lacks suspense and momentum
The Emperor Of The City
By Mark ChinFiction/Partridge Publishing/Paperback/490 pages/$46.10/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3VCVt9D)
2 stars
In a world where society has collapsed, an unnamed man – a millionaire who lives on the top floors of a tower on Russian Hill Island – is struggling to survive. His neighbours, the Leibowitz family, intend to leave for New York and his surroundings look more perilous than ever.
Not long after, the man discovers Mr Leibowitz lying face up in the water. “The fish have nibbled at his milky eyes and his bloated lips.”
The city is rife with squatters, gangs, meth addicts, graffiti, trash, abandoned corners and general entropy.
The man himself does not want to be perceived. Readers learn later that he has killed a member of the Piranhas gang and is on the run, but the fact is revealed only after chapters of immersive detail on how he hides, falls asleep, gets attacked, blacks out and steals from the Leibowitzs’ apartment to eke out a life in this post-apocalyptic world.
It is clear that writer Mark Chin has an eye and a fancy for descriptive detail, rendering the man’s physical struggle with often painstaking precision. But he misses the forest for the trees, as a reader might find it difficult to empathise with the man’s mission to survive without the novel first fleshing out his motivations, biography, personality or, indeed, stakes in this dystopian world.
Only more than 120 pages into the book does the story offer a macro view of this ruined world. It was, in fact, a climate disaster that had plunged the world into such a state.
“At last the West knew the suffering of the pyramid of humanity upon whose shoulders it had stood in cheerful denial. A culture so disconnected from the reality of its environment bore no survival skills; the middle-classes starved in their living rooms as they waited by their TVs for help, while the meek, familiar with hunger and the necessities of desperation, inherited the Earth and all its debts.”
This context comes a little too late, and is delivered as a deluge of information packed in a single chapter such that it feels like contrived world-building instead of the slow, intricate weave of detail. Much of the overlong novel suffers from such choppiness.
The result is a lack of suspense in a book otherwise brimming with the accumulated minutiae of daily life.
If you like this, read: Fearless by M.W. Craven (Constable, 2023, $27.49, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3yVSKiS). Diagnosed with a rare recessive genetic disorder, Ben Koenig is unable to feel fear. It is the English crime writer’s thrilling and page-turning examination of what boundless bravado can help a man achieve.