Landscape with figures

About the book

Lord Sombrewater takes his business associates to sea aboard the Floating Leaf, continuing to direct industrial affairs while the travelers call themselves the Seven Sages. Their recorder, Ambrose Herbert, observes both the scenery and the people, including Sombrewater's daughter Lychnis. A visit to an imagined Chinese valley places their conversational philosophy beside a very different approach to life. Fraser describes the book as an attempt to render experiences inspired by Chinese paintings and porcelain, and its settings follow that artistic invitation rather than the obligations of realistic travel writing. The novel joins sensuous landscape, social comedy, and speculative conversation. Its European visitors bring habits of calculation and control into a world whose beauty repeatedly exceeds the uses they know how to make of it.

• Contemplation and control
• Art and imagination
• Competing forms of wisdom

Why read it

The declared connection with painted landscapes helps readers approach the journey as an imaginative encounter with art.

English Boni & Liveright edition of 1926