KEY POINTS:
How did George Hogg, an Englishman unknown in his own country, become a legend in China - someone whose memory still brings tears to the eyes of those whose lives he touched?
Foreign correspondent MacManus, who stumbled on Hogg's extraordinary story in a Beijing bar, answers the question in a workmanlike account of Hogg's exploits in China during World War II, set against the background of the Japanese invasion and uneasy alliance of communists and nationalists against it (MacManus also co-wrote the screenplay for The Children of Huang Shi, the film based on Hogg's story).
Hogg, at a loose end after an Oxford education, set out on travels with his pacifist campaigner aunt and ended up in Shanghai in 1938. It must have been an eye-opener for a middle-class lad from Hertfordshire. Refugees from the advancing Japanese "ate, slept, made love, gave birth and died on the pavements".
The plight of the Chinese and barbarity of the Japanese (MacManus feels no need to detail atrocities but does not gloss over them) evidently made an impression, and Hogg stayed, finding work through his aunt's contacts as a freelance reporter - first for British, then American, newspapers.
Travels through rural China changed Hogg from observer to activist and he became involved with Rewi Alley (one of several New Zealand connections) in setting up industrial co-operatives and technical training schools, and won the trust of communist leaders. He had romances with Chinese women and adopted four sons, sensibly named Numbers 1-4, survived typhus, dysentery, malaria and anthrax, and wrote a book about his experiences.
In 1942 Hogg, by then fluent in Mandarin, was appointed headmaster of a dilapidated school for orphans in northwest China, which he ran along the lines of an English public school with teams and captains, choir practice and early morning swims in the river.
By 1944 the advance of the Japanese was putting the school in peril and - in what is no doubt the centrepiece of the film - Hogg led his pupils on a 1126km journey over icy mountains, in temperatures that dropped to - 30C, to the safety of a small town on the edge of the Gobi Desert. There he set up the school again and remained with his students until his death in 1945.
MacManus draws on Hogg's letters home, his journalism, and interviews with former pupils and colleagues for his portrait, but despite the painstaking research Hogg is elusive. The how of the legend is explained but not the why.
The cover photo shows him standing next to a Chinese soldier, each looking as inscrutable as the other.
Ocean Devil
By James MacManus (HarperCollins $24.99)
* David Lawrence is an Auckland reviewer.
