Dazzling and Disappointing

Set in eighth-century China, in the ancient capital of the Tang dynasty, The Walking Boy opens with a promising array of historical and fictional characters: Wu Zhao, one of the most remarkable women in Chinese history, who, not content to be empress, deposed her son and declared herself emperor; her courtiers both loyal and treacherous; a Buddhist monk and his former lover, a gifted artisan; and, finally, the walking boy himself, a 16-year-old hermaphrodite sent on a journey that will bring these stories together.

As Lydia Kwa, author of The Colours of Heroines, a collection of poetry, and the novel This Place Called Absence, works her way through these narrative strands, we are treated to exquisite detail, from the grandly named palace pavilions to “five peeled, pitted lychees gleaming in a silver bowl of chilled water.” The strength of the novel is in these riches, and in the ironies they illuminate: characters put on silk tunics in...