Having seen the 1966 movie with Steve McQueen, Candice Bergen and Richard Crenna, It took me far too long to get the novel. After almost 50 years, I regret not having read it much earlier. It is quite simply one of the finest novels I've ever read. I rank it on a par with the greats--of Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Styron et. al. It's hard to believe that this is McKenna's FIRST novel and that he didn't start his writing career until relatively late in life--his mid-40s. It is quite regrettable that this was his ONLY novel before his untimely death at age 51 in 1964. Not only did he live the life of the Yangtze Patrol gunboat sailors he so meticulously and compassionately describes, but he has brought to life the chaos of Revolutionary China on the eve of the Kuomintang revolution that wracked this fascinating land for 15 years before the Japanese invasion and culminated in the Nationalist/Maoist split that sent Chiang kai Shek to rule a rump republic in Taiwan, with Mao and he glaring threateningly across the straits. It is sometimes forgotten that for a while Chiang was the arch-enemy of the American, British and Europeans who enjoyed "treaty privileges" thanks to the cannons of their roving river gunboats. Of course he became an ally of convenience when the Red Scare dominated American attitudes towards the Far East. The roles and attitudes of the missionaries, at times in conflict with the sailors and marines who perforce defended them, are portrayed with finesse and nuance.Besides the wonderful word pictures of China and its people during these turbulent years, McKenna has crafted a finely honed naval adventure tale, without the facile bravado of so many military authors. More importantly, the characters he draws, especially that of the tragically fated Jake Holman and his might-have-been life companion Shirley Eckert are skilfully depicted, not to mention the various minor characters, especially Frenchy Burgoyne and the conflicted Chinese-American Mailly. This novel is not only a wonderful sociological study of the American gunboat Navy of the 1920s and the conflicts wracking revolutionary China but works on every level--character evolution, plot development and deeper meaning. It is a novel one can read and re-read, evoking new meaning at each.