Quiller Bamboo

Encouraged by the West to spearhead a pro-democracy movement, an outspoken refugee from the Tiananmen Square massacre finds help with his efforts in Quiller, a Western agent ordered to lead the rebel to safety. Reprint. NYT. PW. K. From Publishers WeeklyHis latest mission--his 16th--takes British intelligence agent Quiller on a tense adventure to exotic locales in the Far East. He is assigned to ensure a safe passage out of China for Dr. Xingyu Baibing, renowned Chinese astrophysicist and popular dissident leader. Xingyu's ouspoken support of democracy, which helped incite student rebellions culminating in the 1989 riots in Tiananmen Square, is shared by the ambassador Qiao, an intelligence source for the West. The assignment, which could signal the inception of a new Chinese leadership sympathetic to capitalism, is daunting to Quiller, but his anxiety seems to have been for naught in light of the anticlimactic ending. Insistently driving home the conflict between democracy and communism, Hall's characteristically lean prose offers some exciting moments, but several sequences, such as Quiller's secret stay in a Tibetan monastery, are needlessly drawn out. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus ReviewsBritish superspook Quiller (The Quiller Memorandum, Quiller Barracuda, etc.), weariest of all the sons of Bond, is assigned to protect a potential revolutionary from the Chinese government. The unlikely rabble-rouser is diabetic astrophysicist Dr. Xingyu Baibing, whose charismatic disaffection with the Communists since Tiananmen Square makes him the obvious rallying point for an armed counterrevolution that just might bring democracy to China--and who, expelled from the Party, has sought asylum with British diplomats who are bringing him to Hong Kong. Quiller's assignment: to meet Dr. Xingyu (``the messiah''), spirit him away from the Chinese agents who plan to grab him in Hong Kong (so they can brainwash him and send him back to China to sing a different tune), and smuggle him into Beijing as spokesman for the democratic revolutionaries. Everything that can go wrong does, of course: the operations coordinator is a turncoat; Dr. Xingyu wants to go back when he hears his wife's been arrested; Quiller has to break cover to get insulin in the Tibetan village where Xingyu's insisted on going to ground; and another cadre of free-lance revolutionaries wants to send Xingyu back to Beijing under their sponsorship. Hall's plotting is less intricate than usual, the precisely calibrated dangers little more than a series of riffs. But depressive, sententious Quiller is as good company as ever in this lesser entry in a fine series. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.