NOTE: Since I don't think it'll be such a loss if other people don't read this book, there are considerably more spoilers in this review than usual.

RA MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon has garnered plenty of praise for being an understated but enthralling fantasy, despite its brevity. I, on the other hand, found it dull and insufferable.

Tea concerns Martha MacNamara, a violinist with a penchant for Zen, who is in San Francisco after receiving an urgent letter from her daughter. When Martha arrives in San Francisco, her daughter is missing--and nobody knows where she is. But then Martha meets the enigmatic Mayland Long, a thin, dark man with unusual hands and a "gorgeous voice" who, when drunk, will claim that he used to be an ancient Chinese black dragon. Mayland decides to help Martha, and together they uncover a mystery more dangerous than they had originally imagined.

Tea suffers from some serious plotting problems. Near the beginning of the book, several important events happen off-stage and are only mentioned off-hand after they occur (the most egregious example of which is Martha's attempt to meet her daughter). The book also simply asserts several key emotional changes--in particular, the developing relationship between Mayland and Martha. At first they just seem friendly with each other, then suddenly, somewhere in the middle of the book, Mayland ruminates, "If [Martha] were dead, then hope was dead, and his own existence turned to ashes." When did she become so important, and why? I certainly don't know.

Aside from its plotting problems, the book also suffers from being too coyly mysterious throughout--with the result that it ends up just seeming pretentious. One particularly awkward moment occurs when Mayland is in a computer store. He sees a computer that is running the program Life, and the program swiftly becomes another locus for extended pseudo-deep rumination. "Mr. Long grasped the mathematics of it, and also the metaphor. His eyes watched tiny colonies grow, proliferate, compete with one another for space, fail through mysterious inner processes, die...like societies of men.... A moment before the glider intersected the stable colony, his hand struck the keyboard of the computer, freezing the action. 'Live,' he whispered to the dot of light." The most laughable moment occurs, however, when Mayland presents Martha with a rose and comments on the rose's symbolism. Martha responds, "Symbol? What's a symbol? This is a rose." And this prompts the following passage (I kid you not): "The moment rang for Mayland Long--rang as though the entire sky had become a gong and Martha MacNamara had struck it. He stood still, while the gray stone city reeled about him. The four words echoed in his head. 'This is a rose.' The simple, dumb truth of them announced the universe." Unbelievably, Martha's sentence turns out to be a crucial part of the major epiphany in this book.

The worst part about all of this pseudo-deep philosophy is that much of it occurs during times when you would think a reasonable person would not waste time ruminating. Martha wastes a lot of time on coyly mysterious conversations on abstract topics even when she thinks her daughter is in terrible danger. And consider the following bit of wisdom from Mayland: "A man is an unusual being. He is capable of tremendous precision of thought. What is more, he creates--languages, philosophies, poetry...in short, he is the paragon of the animals. Yet he is so eminently--what is the right word?--distractable.... Yet this is not a flaw in man, I think. This is what makes him man. And I must believe there is value in that." Now, when do you think somebody would say something like that? Perhaps over tea with a close friends--and there are more than enough of those moments in this book. But no, this particular nugget drops from Mayland's lips while he is about to leap from the trunk of a car that is being driven by a person who plans to kill him. That's right--in between springing the trunk open and leaping to freedom, Mayland stops to tell us what he thinks about man. Lovely.

Finally, as if things couldn't get worse, the story is incredibly dull. Martha's daughter is kidnapped--very frightening. But it is a very small kidnapping, the stakes are never believable, and the whole hullabaloo is about--hold your breath--a financial scandal. Plus the mystery is just awful--never terribly interesting, and never terribly mysterious.

Tea is not an offensively bad book, and perhaps others' tastes will vary. But I can honestly say that I didn't enjoy a single minute of it.

Copyright © 2002 Steven Wu