"One of the five most important writers in America today," thunders Tom Wolfe on the dust wrapper, leading the barrage of hype, and leaving the more distracted reader wondering who on earth the other four might be. On the strength of this, Webb is nothing special, in spite of personal letters from high-ups in his UK publishing company promising the reviewer a work of rare quality - "best novel in years", "biggest book/movie deal", plus a note that Webb comes with a bucketful of medals from Vietnam. Push hard enough and critics can and will roll over, like they did for Hannibal.
The size of deals notwithstanding, The Emperor's General is a routine tale of love, war and American "dooty", as comfortable as a mini-series, a long flashback book ended by the present-day regrets of an American big cheese looking back to his war in the Far East. Webb is to now what serviceable best-sellers like Pearl S Buck and Richard Mason were to their day, offering the mysteries of the east as a commercial package, the frisson of foreign affairs and the Orient as the acceptable face of miscegenation.
The bulk is an historical reconstruction of the American occupation of Japan after the second world war, seen through the eyes of a junior aide to General MacArthur, a vainglorious leader with too much of an eye on posterity. MacArthur's rugged individualism turns out to be no match for the wily imperial collective, and, anyway, he emerges as something of a false loner, too dependent on entourage, sycophancy and photo opportunity, unlike his nemesis, General Yamashita, the superior soldier with none of his rival's political guile, which is why he ends up the one being hanged.
Webb is fashionably tough on his own side, and at his best when he concentrates on the legal wrangling surrounding Yamashita's trial, brought about by Mac-Arthur's insistence, for war crimes he did not commit. The nuances of insubordination and the pecking-order are handled more comfortably than the broad sweep, which remains grounded by bad prose.
In the end, the book's compromises mirror those of its protagonist. Webb goes for the big money, while lacking the compulsion of great popular writing, and along the way loses a more observant, less commercial, book that was there for the writing on the trial of Yamashita and the complexities of heroism.
