Book Review: Queen of Spades by Michael Shou-Yung Shum

Cinema far more than the page has been the place for good high stakes action. So it is perhaps not surprising that The Queen of Spades, although based on a Pushkin short story, owes more to onscreen gambling than to the written word, Hong Kong gambling flicks in particular.

The story follows several characters: a dealer at the Royal Casino near Seattle, who becomes obsessed with a mysterious gambler known only as the Countess; his pit boss who is dealing with terminal dementia with his spiritual advisors; and a pair of ex-spouses one of whom is being stalked by her GA sponsor and the other of whom owes the wrong people.

These characters deal with the vagaries of the gambling life, doing their best to manipulate, avoid, and accept their fates while also turning a small profit. From this basic setup Shum weaves something which is half analysis of addiction, half meditation on chance and destiny, and all Hong Kong gambling flick.

Chance and Circumstance

The solid, professional prose and richly imagined characters, are probably sufficient to keep you entertained but the book does have interesting ideas swimming about beneath its light entertainment surface. None of the explanations for the strange turns of chance and coincidence at the Royal seem sufficient.

This constant hinting at the beyond without ever showing us the monster means the book operates in an ambiguous liminal area somewhere between being Rounders, and being a 21st Century fairytale. This facet of the novel is summed at one point when the Countess tells Chan:

“We can never know anything for sure [...] For what we speak of is gambling."  His response is to accept this understanding that: “any explanation that was more certain would be in some sense unsatisfactory – the bond of chance was what was now uniting him with this profoundly singular gambler.”

The ideas serve the story, not the other way round. Which is not to say the novel is flawless. Some thread don’t seem to satisfactorily tie off, and there is a little more anti than ante in the climax. Perhaps such open endedness is the price of the thematic ambiguity.

Authority and Conviction

Another help is that Michael Shou-Yung Shum’s bring his twenty years in the casino business to the page. The book rings true in its details, from casino politics to dealer’s choice home games.

The book also borrows techniques from poker nonfiction: one chapter consists simply of the rules of Faro, the card games are embedded with graphics of the cards as they are dealt, and there is even a seating diagram when a game of poker starts up.

While, I rather enjoyed seeing these formal tricks tried out, they felt somewhat out of place in a book which otherwise owes far more to a writer like Ian Fleming than to George Perec.

In Short

On the whole the book is sturdily constructed, with some intriguing ideas bubbling underneath. Think God of Gamblers with A-levels. I would highly recommend.

If you want to follow up on that recommendation at the time of writing, then you’ll have to wait to  grab a copy after its release on the 10th October 2017, or it is up on Amazon with pre-ordering as an option.