Okay, this thread had no takers, so I'll express what my beta-readers of the Jade Owl series expressed. Each one (and there were 25 of them) when Rowdy and Nick are arrested, sent me feedback that they were surprised at this turn of events. They loved it, and told me it humanized the characters to a new level. I told them the reasons for this turn of events from an author's point of view.
1 - What I needed Rowdy and Nick to do in the balance of this book, required them to be so close and so familiar that I had to give them a life-threatening situation.
2 - I needed a human villain so vile (you ain't done with him yet), that the reader feels like kicking him in the head and other places.
3 - I needed Nick to deteriorate (for many reasons that are upcoming)
4 - I needed to present a different and fairer view of the Chinese system of justice. Bao Ben-ch'u (Benbo Baggins) is one view - cruel and malicious, but the other view is more important. Lu Xing, the face of modern China, a figure important for the rest of the series. The system of Chinese justice is textbook and real. Although it feels odd to us, we must recall that in the world's total population, Westerners and Western jurisprudence is the minority view.
5 - I needed motivations for future developments, especially with blanket boy and the transfer of Moe the pen (the Tale of Moe goes to the end).
6 - I needed to reintroduce Bradley Moorehouse into the story. What better way.
7 - I needed a near death experience to bond Nick and Rowden so closely that their friendship rises to a fever pitch.
This was a difficult section to write. Authors have a mechanic called POV, and there's a rule that when writing any given section in 3rd person limited view point, you can never pop out of one Point of View into another (head hoping). Head hoping is 3rd person omniscient and few modern authors are proficient at it (I'm reading an author now, Michael Hicks, who is a master at it). However, in the Old Sheep section I introduce a way to break the POV rules, because Nick and Rowden are becoming telephatic. So I was able to jump from POV to POV without violation. This switch in mode I keep for the rest of the series.
That Rowden and Nick get out of this situation is no surprise, because if they didn't, you wouldn't have another 3,000 pages of the series to read.
However, the fact that I would allow them to get into this situation is the surprise. The actual experience they had in there was based on a combination of some text I read concerning Chinese detention centers and books on Japanese concentation camps. I also saw a detention center (outside - and it looked like I described it). China has no prisons. You are never sentenced to TIME. That is not a punishment in Chinese culture. Besides, the Chinese find prisons costly (duh - like we don't know that), and have never adopted them. You are detained, tried (read: judged - in Imperial China, the same judging system prevailed only the Magistrate was usually the local official (see The Academician)), and punished - which has varied over the centuries. When I was in China, there was a public execution and a display of the remains in the People's History Museum. Our guide, Peter Tang (the prototype for Thomas Ch'en) escorted us into the People's History Museum and told us there were certain exhibits that day that we were forbidden to see. Good thing. (By the way, the crime that day was - Sexual Harassment. Five Chinese son of officials were sexually harassing their underlings. They were tried and executed. Can you imagine what that would do to the office scene in America). Also I often wonder what happened to Peter Tang. He was an ouspoken, lieral Guide and told us many anti-state things. This was all before Tien-an-men Square massacre. (Ann, you were corect that Thomas Ch'en's brother fell at Tien-an-men. That came about with my thinking of Peter Tang, and also perhaps Huang T'ou, our guide in Gui-lin, who is the bases for Huang Li-fa - little cricket).
The tribunal follows the current Chinese method, even to Wu Ch'e-k'ai's right to examine the defendants. Of course, the discussion of justice and truth is less Chinese than part of the novel, because Justice and Truth is an underlying theme of the series. (one of the themes).
The iconic scene, for me as an author, is Rowden calling Nick back to life (something that his counterpart in the Southern Swallow series also does). Rowden hears the horn. (You shall all hear the horn before I'm don with yer). The passion of friendship is the keynote here, and echoes the tomb scene at the end of The Jade Owl. An author who designs a novel does so with patterns that weave the cloth until its symmetric (ask Betsy the Quilter). Echoes, repetition of images and even dialog is all part of the weave.
Anyhow - the Third Peregrination has just begun. Hold onto your hats folks because the rest of the novel is a roller coaster ride. Weeeee!
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