Richard M. Mckenna (1913–1964)

Published in 1962, The Sand Pebbles is book about the fictional U.S. Navy gunboat San Pablo, patrolling the rivers and ports of China in the 1920’s. As the story opens, protagonist Jake Holman is just arriving onboard. He is not a typical sailor – he resents the submission to authority and discipline required for military duty. He has been shuffled from one ship to another due to his attitude. He excels at maintaining the ship’s engines.

Holman, as an outsider, is not popular with the show more crew, but eventually makes a few loyal friends. He takes one of the Chinese laborers under his wing to teach him about engines. He helps another when the friend becomes involved with a local Chinese woman. Jake keeps in touch with a female Christian missionary and teacher he met on his way to his duty station. He forms genuine friendships for the first time in his life. He does not buy into the racist attitudes toward the Chinese and becomes a sympathetic character.

The first half of the book describes shipboard and shoreside life during the era of “gunboat diplomacy” and the second shows the changes brought about by the rise of Chinese Nationalism. Themes include identity, loyalty, courage, class, and power. It is a story of a country on the verge of revolution, and the impact on the forces that previously had the upper hand.

The author vividly portrays the time and place. The first half is relatively tame compared to the volatile second half. The characters are realistic, with strengths and flaws. Jake’s character is particularly well-formed. McKenna includes representatives of the many groups involved in this complex time. The climax is expertly constructed. The reader can sense the characters’ distress in dealing with torn loyalties and painful decisions. The story includes violence and tragedy, but also tenderness and compassion. It is Jake’s story but also provides insight into this period of China’s history. This was one of my grandfather’s favorite books. show less

“The students say Buddha came to China on a white horse and Christ came on a cannonball.”
—The Sand Pebbles

Very likely no novel ever has devoted more prose to a ship’s engines than does The Sand Pebbles. Richard McKenna’s descriptions of the naval river gunboat San Pablo and its engine room recall Melville’s extensive detailing of the Pequod. It gives substance to the love for machinery felt by the book’s central character, Jake Holman, the ship’s testy engineer.

Engines obey show more well defined rules of repair and maintenance, rules controlling energy and forces, rules that Jake Holman finds congenial. However, the affairs of men and navy and politics, and the confusions they entail, not surprisingly prove of more matter. Rules will change. Jake, and the well portrayed commander of the gunboat, Lt. Collins, are central to how this plays out.

The “Sand Pebbles” are the men who form the official crew of the San Pablo. They are a rollicking group of navy guys with all the frictions and exuberance and tendencies to misbehavior that suggests. The San Pablo also has an unofficial crew of Chinese men who perform many of the regular duties on board normally assigned to Americans. It is a good business partnership for the Chinese crew and the interactions of the two crews catch one’s attention. Though he does less well in their portrayal, McKenna is much concerned with the Chinese, whether crew members or others. Their story is essential to everything the novel confronts.

The book’s dramatic pivot is when rules begin to change for everyone and the Sand Pebbles come to realize for the first time that the assumptions on which their military conduct is based no longer apply. The politics of China had been understood as conflicts of warlords attempting to assert control of regions and cities. When the “gearwheels” (nicknamed after the shape of a symbol on the flags carried by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops) appear, their activity is interpreted as yet another warlord struggle. It is not. The characters find themselves suddenly confronted with forces they are not positioned to understand, enmeshed in the armed revolution by which Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang sought power. The novel portrays, in a different situation, the general struggle also described in André Malraux’s Man’s Fate.

Who are these gearwheels led by Chiang Kai-shek? Command explains:
“Who are they? I’ll tell you who they are. They are more than the simple, ignorant Chinese whom they are using. They are the clever, seeing ones anywhere in the world who fear and envy America . . .
“They are the people who hate America in their hearts,” he said harshly. “They can even be Americans themselves, and those are most devilish of all.”

It is a speech, in a novel published in 1962 about events of the 1920s, which recalls the one given by George W. Bush to Congress days after 9/11:
“Americans are asking ‘Why do they hate us?’…They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”

In China, though, it was not just the Americans inspiring hate. It was all the nations who were party to the Unequal Treaties that the Kuomintang opposed.

Unexpectedly, the ones who “can even be Americans…most devilish of all” include Christian missionaries at work in the Chinese countryside, the ones who have noticed the “great embarrassment…that mission-educated students were the most virulently anti-Christian”:
One of the “devilish” missionaries, the gentle Shirley Eckert, asks “Why can’t we just be citizens of the human race?”
Another “devilish” missionary, the sympathetic Gillespie, replies “Legally, no such human category is permissible.”
The “devilish” head of the Christian mission, Craddock, sums up the situation, saying “Those who put God ahead of country are all in a sense stateless persons.”

Conscience. Loyalty. Duty. These are issues at stake with no easy choices for the reverent or the profane, or for the dissident or the patriot, most especially when danger is pressing.

The author served 22 years in the navy, part of that service in China, and saw duty during World War II and in Korea. He knows his subject and must have given much thought to it. This long but well-paced novel (turned into a major motion picture) spurs the reader to think about it too. show less

"What the hell are the unequal treaties, anyway?" Wilsey said once.
"They give us our treaty rights," Ellis said. "We got to stand up for our rights."
"What the hell ARE our rights?"
"I don't know. I guess the officers know," Ellis said.
__________________

And there in a nutshell is the crux of the book: the blind defenses of Western imperialism whether in military, industrial, or missionary form and the fates they ran into in China during the Northern Expedition revolution of 1926-7. The main show more story of the book is a strong one, clear in its portrait of the racism, the sheer overarching exploitation by the West in post-Imperial China; the _small_ stories do a better job of getting across the bigger picture than a command-level or political drama would. McKenna does a grand job of making the China of that day come alive.

But this book is not without its flaws. A couple are very prominent and I need to point them out; too many of the reviews I've seen apparently give McKenna a total mulligan on them.
First, this is a Man Book: women are totally glossed. The female lead, the supposedly strong-willed missionary Shirley Eckert, exists only as foil for a couple male characters and keeps thinking how she wants a man to take care of her. Women in "The Sand Pebbles" are chattel or poker chips. Maybe that's how McKenna saw the world, but I'd like to reference James Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific" as a similar story, but with its very dynamic women as a counterpoint.
Second, and more irritating to me, is the engine. For the first half of the book, the ship's engine and its nuts-and-bolts (literally) consume entire swaths of text; does McKenna expect readers to know all the parts, configurations, and workings of a coal-fired, triple-expansion steam engine? In Moby-Dick, Melville knows his readers don't know the workings of a whaling ship, so he explains the tools and ship configuration, and includes illustrations to make it clear. Melville's "stuff" remains in play for the rest of the book however, but McKenna just stops writing about the engine altogether halfway in, after having made it a character. Wasted time and space, then.

TSP is a really good book, but that's it. And I sure wish it included a map! Thank goodness for online search engines, now. You kind of need a library to follow along. show less

4.5 stars- rounded down.

It is China 1926. Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang is on the rise and China is on the brink of eruption. Jake Holman is a sailor on the American gunship, San Pablo, and he and his shipmates will be at the center of the explosion, as the Chinese begin to expel foreign interests from their country.

Holman is a misfit. He loves and understands the engine, the machinery for which he is responsible on the ship, but he does not understand people very well and knows little or show more nothing of love. His feelings about the Chinese are not quite in line with his fellow seamen and he befriends and trains a coolie who helps him to see the Chinese as individuals rather than as a class of people to be exploited for labor or sex. He is more aware and more open than those around him, and that does not always serve him well in dealing with those he encounters.

Then there are the missionaries, and particularly Miss Eckert. If you have seen the movie made from this book (a wonderful thing starring the inimitable Steve McQueen), you will expect a more robust love story than you will get between these pages. The romantic angle works for the movie, but here McKenna seems to be making a much different point in having Miss Eckert as part of his tale. She is the unattainable dream and sometimes the motivating force for Holman, and even when he steeps himself in thoughts of her, she eludes him. For each of these men, trapped aboard a small ship in a world that they do not understand and of which they are truly not a part, there is something that pushes them through the frightening situation they are in, and for Holman it is Shirley Eckert.

There is a great deal of detail here about the workings of the engine, the daily lives of the crew and the onboard coolies, the marches and political dealings of the revolutionaries and the rules that operate between the powerful nations that seem to want to divide China between them and the Chinese who are its life’s blood. The details are never boring and always informative of the plot. Nothing is unnecessary or misplaced. I closed the book understanding much more about the era it addresses and the individual characters portrayed.

I have had this book sitting on my library shelf for a number of years, and I am so glad that I did not allow it to sit any longer. I gave a dollar for it on a bargain table...talk about getting your monies worth! show less