The novelist James Clavell must have purchased a job lot of clichés when he wrote his two fictional blockbusters based on the history of the Hong Kongbased Jardine Matheson business empire. Taipan, set in the 19th century, that is the more notorious of...

HERE, as the vulgar popular song has it, We Go Again. On the very day the House of Lords resumed its onerous duties, the Daily Telegraph chose to exhibit the protuberant chip on its left shoulder. The Telegraph was always on the pinkish side...

[In Noble House] James Clavell has given us a game or two to play. The first is called pick-the-hero and it isn't so easy because both candidates wear white hats bespattered with the grey mud of Hong Kong. (p. 61) But let's leave that game for a moment and get on with the next. It's the easier pastime of pick-the-genre, and any answer out of four or five choices is correct. Squeezed into the course of 10 days in Hong Kong in 1963, Noble House is an espionage novel along the lines of Tin...

[In "Noble House" Clavell] has shifted his scene from medieval Japan to the Hong Kong of 18 years ago. But one is still in Asia—where the clash of cultures and ideologies remains as intense in 1963 as in the 1600s. James Clavell is a master yarn-spinner and an expert on detail. Indeed, one sometimes feels overwhelmed with the masses of information and wishes a firmer editing pencil had been applied. But the author, nevertheless, is in a class with James Michener and Robert Elegant in hi...

Not only is "Noble House" as long as life, it's also as rich with possibilities. For by the time you're halfway through this fourth installment in Mr. Clavell's fictional history of the Far East—the previous three entries in which were "King Rat," "Tai-Pan" and "Shogun"—there are so many irons in the fire that almost anything can plausibly happen. It may even be that Mr. Clavell himself loses track of his story. It se...