The Crocodile and the Crane by Arthur Rosenfeld

Can the world be saved by tai chi?

Oh, come on. Don’t roll your eyes. While that may be the premise of Arthur Rosenfeld’s The Crocodile and the Crane, you don’t have to be a martial artist or an acolyte of Eastern philosophy to enjoy this novel’s genre-bending mix of apocalyptic entertainments.

That’s because The Crocodile and the Crane is as much sci-fi as it is mystical fantasy. It calls to mind nothing so much as Damon Knight’s sadly underappreciated Why Do Birds, although with more narrative drive and less lofty literary ambitions than that 1992 end-of-the-world thriller.

Rosenfeld centers his story on Gao Sanfeng and Gao Zetian, brother and sister, who have found immortality through the practice of a secret form of qigong, a variety of tai chi, devised by their parents. More than 3,000 years ago, when they were still children, they watched as their father was sacrificed by the residents of Benpo, an overcrowded valley, where people were starting to die of a strange illness that dissolved their tissues and left their faces fixed in a grinning rictus.

In the present day, Sanfeng and Zetian, magnates of a multinational corporation based in Hong Kong, are rich beyond measure, although immortality has affected each of them in very different ways.

Sanfeng remains, behind the mask of wealth, a humble seeker of truth, while Zetian has embraced the allure of power and sexuality her unnatural vitality puts within reach. Yet they remain bound by their love for each other, their shared qigong practice, and their pledge to their long-dead father not to show it to anyone else.

Meanwhile, a new plague breaks out in Jakarta, its first victim the beloved young son of a beautiful single-mom nurse named Leili Musi. Soon all of Indonesia is in the grip of the illness, which dissolves tissues and contorts the faces of its victims into a gruesome grin. When word of the disease reaches Hong Kong, Sanfeng and Zetian recognize it immediately — the “Banpo Smile” has returned, as they always knew it would.

Leili, the only survivor in Indonesia, assists a French researcher who figures out the cause of the plague just before he, too, succumbs.

It’s not, as everyone else believes, a virus or germ or other pathogen, but instead the result of genetically programmed cell death, similar to the process by which people are programmed to age and die. The Banpo Smile is a Darwinian form of population control, designed to turn on when humanity reaches a tipping point of physical crowdedness and general degeneracy.

Soon outbreaks pop up in random parts of the world, and the human race stands on the brink of extinction.

Sanfeng and Zetian, of course, have a cure in the secret qigong practice that has protected them for millennia, but only one wishes to share it with what remains of humanity, selecting an American self-help author named Dalton Day as spokesman. The other, desiring only personal power, fights to keep the secret from the world.

Day, an expert on traditional Chinese philosophy traveling in Hong Kong on a book tour, is drawn into the cosmic drama as a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice.

Rosenfeld mingles all these elements into a thriller of uncommon inventiveness.

He balances mysticism with just the right amount of science; comic-book-style action and intrigue with a countervailing degree of character development and personal story; big ideas with just the right dollop of pulpy narrative energy. Through it all runs a deep appreciation of martial arts and Chinese lore, as well a keen knowledge of the changes wrought in China by industrialization and a modern consumerist economy.

Rosenfeld’s mastery of his story is so thorough that when a small group of people on a remote island begin to learn the qigong movements for the first time, even the most committed sluggard, accustomed to stretching no further than the potato chip bowl, may find a lump in his throat.

In the hands of the right filmmaker, The Crocodile and the Crane could be a terrific movie.

RATING 8 / 10