I believe the time is early 20th century. A young, fresh-out-of-school American engineer is sent to China to tour the Yangtze River for his company, in order to write a report about the possibilities for dams for his company could build on that river. His mission is to look for suitable narrow gorges of strong rock.
The only boat he could get a ride on is a smallish junk. The trip lets him get to know the truly ancient ways in which the people work on the river - including the captain of the junk, the captain's young pretty wife, and the head tow man (the boat, going upstream, is being mainly towed by men on the banks tied by ropes to the boat), and their, to him, mysterious feelings and respect for the river.

Less than 200 pages.

For me, this was not at the wonderful level of Hersey's "Bell for Adano" or "The Child Buyer," but it was worth a shot to try to find something else of his that good. ( )

Hersey grew up in China, and spent some time there prior to World War II. This is a short, simple story about the intrusion of a European, a somewhat pompous callow youth, into the life of the river boat workers in the famous Three Gorges of China in the 1920's. The miscommunication is perfectly conveyed. It is the difference in outlooks and ambition between those who would seek to 'tame' nature, and those who accept it and do no more than attempt to propitiate its malignant spirits. Because the youth is there to assess the suitability of the Gorges as a site for a massive dam, which will destroy that world. The exceptional power of the story comes, of course, from our knowledge that forty years after Hersey wrote this fictional account, they did build the dam. The resulting lake not only displaced millions of Chinese, but also drowned and erased the world that Hersey describes with such vivid imagery.

Hersey is far more widely known, and regarded with some awe, as the journalist who told the world the shattering story of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bomb, using the words of people who had stood beneath it. Arguably this one newspaper story opened the eyes of the world to the utter horror of nuclear war. And there's some things about how he made that story so powerful, that also plays out in this very slight novel.

Hersey's voice - and you sense it is him - in this novel is intensely personal and self-indulgent, but also remote and abstract. He conveys the sense of a young man who blusters at one moment and is crushed the next by lifes simple adversities. He seems to have reached that point, after a short life of success and achievement, when the realization comes that his knowledge and authority are illusory. The power of this character development is set against not only the forces of nature, but against the character of the people who work in the Gorges on fragile man-hauled boats in constant poverty and always near to death and ruin.

These characters, the Chinese and the river (because the reader comes to see it as a living thing), are not just there as a counterpoint to the young man's story, but are in some confusing sense, the actual story. In this interpretation the young man is an insignificant socially inept non-entity that takes up only a few moments of their lives and leaves them completely unaffected. Hersey's refusal to let his character control the story, but rather be swept along by it, leaves some readers uncomfortable I suspect. Who do I identify with? Who is right and wrong, and what happened just now? It is only with hindsight that we can see, as Hersey knew at the time, that the Dam was coming, that the technocratic 'nature will bend to our will' forces would carry the day, in the end. So a story that might seem chaotic, like the surface of the river boiling against the giant rapids, actually moves with tremendous force towards the conclusion.

For the sake of the power of the story, and its brevity (because it is something special to do so much with so few words) I would rate this highly. But as a description of the appearance and character of a place that no longer exists this is superb. That world is now up to 300 feet below the calm surface of the new lake spreading behind the Three Gorges Dam and it will never return. But the story has lingering power. Highly recommended.

Some photographs of places mentioned in the novel are here. Noting though that some development of the tow-paths had occurred between the 1920's and the 1990's when these photos were taken. And noting, of course, that all of this is now under water. ( )

This was a surprisingly good novella sadly lost to the annals of time. Sadly, because it has a lot to say about the questionable good of "progress" and harnessing of nature, technology ,etc. that goes on each day at present. At its core, this is a simple story of a young American engineer sent to China by his compay to survey the Yangtze River for potential dam sites. The ambitious fellow learns Mandarin for his trip, which not only makes him able to communicate, but it throws a wrench into much of what he thought he believed about society, education, work and happiness. He quickly learns that American/Western ways of life have little relevance on the wild Yangtze River, nor are they particularly helpful, even, at times, harmful. What makes this book shine is the sensitivity of handling of both the Chinese characters and the engineer (we never learn his name). Although there is humor in the clash of cultures and ideas, wealthy and poor, it seems each person is just willing enough to consider another viewpoint. Although this was published in 1956 and tells a story set in the '20s, it seems so relevant to the unfortunate developments the U.S. has taken (as well as China). Hersey was a great writer, packing a whallop into a short space. Highly recommended. ( )