The Last Mandarin
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Louise Penny on The Last Mandarin
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A phone call about Afghanistan, not a bookThe collaboration did not begin with a pitch. When the Taliban retook Kabul in August 2021, Penny contacted Fung through journalist Wendy Mesley because she needed help getting Afghan women out of the country. What grew from that emergency call, over bowls of noodles in London and Hong Kong, eventually became a novel. Penny explains what made her want to write with Fung specifically.
She’s remarkable. She had been a journalist in Afghanistan and her story is really compelling... I just thought, this is someone I’d like to co-write with. She had never written fiction, and... she was full of ideas and just a really profoundly good person. [paraphrased from audio]
Fung brought something Penny could not supply on her own: more than a decade of field reporting from conflict zones, including 28 days in captivity in Afghanistan in 2008, which she later turned into her first book, ‘Under an Afghan Sky’. The geopolitical texture of ‘The Last Mandarin’ draws directly from what Fung witnessed firsthand.
The book’s subject found them before they decided to write together. Foreign interference in elections was dominating international headlines in the period before the 2024 U.S. presidential vote, and both authors were watching closely. Fung explains how that shared preoccupation became a premise.
It was something that we both were following, and we thought that this would make good fiction.
Once they had the subject, the question was form. Penny had already co-written a political thriller with Hillary Rodham Clinton (‘State of Terror’, 2021), so she was clear-eyed about what fiction could do that a reported cautionary tale could not. She made the case for the novel bluntly.
If we had written it as non-fiction, a cautionary tale, no one would have bought the book… because it’s like eating broccoli, shove it down people’s throats, it’s good for you. You make it entertaining, and people come to the same conclusion but in a way that is much more approachable than if we had written it as a polemic.
How she wrote it
A first-time novelist and too many paragraphsThe practical mechanics of the collaboration were straightforward: the two authors alternated chapters, then reviewed each other’s drafts, and Penny did a final pass on the complete manuscript to pull it into a single voice. Penny describes the process, and what made it run smoothly.
We’d go over each other’s writing, so that there was a common ‘voice’ and tone. We always talked about ‘what next,’ and I cannot think of a single instant when we disagreed.
Because Fung had never written fiction before, the revision process doubled as a craft education. Fung came to it trained in the compressed, factual register of broadcast journalism, which left a specific kind of mark on her early drafts. She describes what Penny kept catching.
It was more Louise going over my endless paragraphs and suggesting we use more dialogue — that was also part of the masterclass!
Fung’s journalism background created a subtler problem too. Penny recalled, with some amusement, that Fung initially had real difficulty killing off characters, a reflex that makes sense for a reporter who has spent a career accounting for real lives. Calibrating the novel’s distance from verified fact was the other sustained difficulty. The manuscript was revised repeatedly as events unfolded after the 2024 U.S. election, and Penny describes the line they were trying to hold.
For this book, we needed to be able to diverge from the facts but not go so far that it becomes ludicrous.
The two central characters, spy handler Vivien and her daughter Alice, were not constructed from genre requirements. Both authors found the mother-daughter dynamic in their own lives, and both recognize themselves more in the insecure daughter than in the formidable mother. Penny explains where Vivien and Alice actually came from.
I’m not sure there are many mothers and daughters who have not struggled with their relationship. Mellissa has. I have. That’s where Vivien and Alice come from. Real life. We wanted to make them relatable, recognisable. Not always sympathetic. Complex in their yearns, and misunderstandings, desperate for approval while fearful of rejection.
The personal thread
Both authors are AliceAlice’s defining trait is the hunger for a parent’s approval she can never quite earn. Penny has said that Alice’s emotional position maps onto her own relationship with her mother. Fung was equally direct about which side of the mother-daughter divide she inhabits.
I think I am more like Alice too, with all her insecurities about not living up to her mother’s expectations.
On what the book is wrestling with
Grey zones, not obvious villainsThe plot turns on a cyberattack with AI at its center, but Penny is firm that the book is not a warning about technology. She reaches instead for W.H. Auden’s observation that evil is unspectacular and Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil to locate the actual threat in ordinary human motivation. That framing shapes who ultimately drives the danger in the novel. Alongside that argument about human fallibility, Fung wanted to push back against a geopolitical habit she sees in Western fiction specifically: casting China as the default antagonist. She explains what she and Penny were resisting.
I think that in the West, we often depict China as the bad actor on the world stage. And in China, the Americans are depicted as the bad actors. Given what’s happening in America right now, they might be right. I still have family in China, and they are all just living their life... So we wanted to show that it’s too simplistic a world view to see things in black and white like that. We all live in the grey.
Executing that balance meant writing both the American and Chinese presidents as full human beings: self-interested, fallible, and genuinely concerned about their own people. The novel holds the two in tension without resolving them into heroes and villains. Fung names the choice they made at the character level.
We were very careful not to make the Chinese the obvious bad guys.
What she wants us to sit with
Decency as the argument, not the consolation prizePenny has spent the Gamache series, her long-running detective sequence set in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, arguing that moral decency is not a handicap for a fictional character. She carries that argument into ‘The Last Mandarin’ without softening it. She names what she believes the two books share at their core.
I think that in the Gamache books, as in this book, the goodness and the decency is what counts. The belief that decency will win is at the backbone of ‘The Last Mandarin.’
Penny has heard the counter-argument often enough that she addresses it as a received idea rather than a live debate. The claim that decent characters are boring belongs, in her view, to a genre convention that mistakes cynicism for depth. She made the case in a piece about the Eastern Townships and the Gamache series, but she has applied it explicitly to ‘The Last Mandarin’ as well.
There is a false narrative that nice people, good people are boring. And that simply isn’t true. Anyone can be cynical. Anyone can be sarcastic. Anyone can be negative. Anyone can find fault... Writing about decent people — people who are trying to be decent in this climate — is really, really fascinating.