This book has sat on my TBR shelves for far too long, but the sequel has now been released, I have a copy and should take care of both. Half of me is annoyed with myself because I've missed out on this gem of a novel for two years, but the other half is happy because I can roll right into the next, possibly last, volume immediately. I will happily do that next month because I dearly want to know what happens next.
Shelley Parker-Chan, a debut novelist who should absolutely be proud of what they've achieved on their first time out, states in their acknowledgements that they wrote this because they wanted to read it, and that's arguably the best reason to write a book. In this instance, they're a fan of East Asian historical dramas on television, so naturally wanted to read something similar, only to find a lack of such material in novels. This is a beginning to plugging that gap and it's a good one.
We're in fourteenth-century China, which Parker-Chan brings to life with all the grandeur and the poverty that might suggest. Some of this is about the poor, worthless and easily discarded, lost in famine or in war. Much of it is about the rich, educated and powerful, who run the world. The best parts are about how characters can move from one category to the other, starting with the young lady whose name we never learn but becomes Zhu Chongba, destined for greatness, literally, by a fortune-teller.
In reality, Zhu Chongba is her brother, the eighth son of the Zhu family, but he quickly fails to meet the fortune-teller's predictions of bringing a hundred generations of pride to the family name, by dying only six pages later, after bandits raid their village and take what little they have left in the depth of a famine. We're still in chapter one and so his sister, deemed worthless in China, decides to take his fate for her own by taking his name. She becomes Zhu Chongba and thus adopts a male set of prefixes as she presents herself to Wuhuang Monastery to train as a monk, which I'll follow.
At this point, he's ten-years-old, pretending to be eleven, and everything is danger. Not only is this first part of three a coming-of-age story, it's a survival story and a story about passing. Zhu is sharp and inventive, as well as ambitious, and figures out a way to believably avoid revealing his female body parts, something that would end this novel before it begins. He progresses over nine years to become not only a monk but a trusted confidante, almost a right hand man, to the abbot. That requires not only talent, discipline and perseverance, but also the willingness to do what it takes to keep his secret intact, each of which serves as bedrock for where this story will go.
And it moves on. The eunuch Ouyang, the favourite general of Lord Esen-Tumur, Prince of Henan, burns Wuhuang Monastery to the ground, thus forcing change. Zhu finds his way to Anfeng, where intrigue rages in the halls of power. Anfeng is the home of the Red Turbans, a rebel Chinese army eager to defeat the Great Yuan, the Mongol empire led by Khubilai Khan. When Zhu achieves an impressive victory for the Red Turbans over General Ouyang's vastly superior invading force, not by leading an army but by avoiding the battle by killing ten thousand enemy soldiers and just like that he gains entry to those halls of power and joins the intrigue.
I won't go further into a synopsis, because Shelley-Chan paints a vivid picture of Mongol occupied China through an ensemble cast of characters, by visiting them on both sides and by pitting them against each other in a succession of battles. This is epic in scale and majestic in reach, even if we focus on individual characters throughout. Zhu Chongba and General Ouyang are the leads, but a slew of others have prominent roles, some of whom are killed off and others of whom survive, no doubt to return in the second book.
I liked both of them, though they're each drawn well enough to show negative sides.
Zhu is a force to be reckoned with wrapped up in a small and unimposing package. He has complete equanimity appropriate for a monk and often reminded me of Kwai Chang Kaine in 'Kung Fu'. He speaks softly and humbly, rarely stating anything from the perspective of self. Instead of starting sentences with "I", he tends to use a variation of "This lowly monk". Sharp and ambitious from the outset, he grows nonetheless. Much of what he does works out, not least a couple of crucial tests intended for him to fail and a relationship with Ma Xiuying, the widow of a disgraced general. He's not without flaw though and, rather crucially, he makes mistakes, or what appear to be mistakes at the time. Some turn out, in hindsight, to be necessary steps towards meeting the predictions of the fortune-teller who sparked everything in the first chapter.
Ouyang is a man of vengeance, though his gender is as overt a question mark as Zhu's. The latter is a biological woman who's passing for a man through necessity. Ouyang is a biological man, but he has no male genitalia because that was the price of staying alive when the Prince of Henan's father had his entire family put to death. As such, he doesn't remotely feel like a man, though he rages if anyone compares him to a woman, which they often do because he's cursed with beauty. He isn't handsome; he's beautiful. He lives for revenge, and we can get behind that, but there's a lot more going on in his head than one overriding driving force.
In short, both are complex characters who can be sympathetic and forces for good; but can also be brutal and cruel. Notably, they're on opposite sides of a war, even though they kinda-sorta aren't. Zhu, fighting with the Red Turbans, wants to return China to the Chinese by destroying or driving out the Mongol invaders. Ouyang, fighting with those Mongols, wants revenge by killing off a lot of the people he works for. That context makes it particularly fascinating whenever they're pitted against each other, usually in the field of battle.
I'm focusing on these two, because they're the leads, but I appreciated, if not always liked, a lot of other important characters, especially Lord Esen-Temur and Ma Xiyuing. Wang Baoxiang is Esen's adopted younger brother, a scholar not a warrior who manages the Prince of Henan's estates and pisses him off on a regular basis. Xu Da starts out as Zhu's friend at the monastery, who keeps his secret and becomes a Red Turban leader. Wuchun Chaghan is a thief in Anfeng who becomes much more. Some characters are even enjoyable just to see them fall, like the arrogant Altan-Baatar.
This is a success on a number of fronts. As immersion into history, it's evocative and effective, with Parker-Chan doing a fantastic job for a first time novelist in translating visual action into prose. I haven't seen the television epics that they have, but I've seen many of the same stories in epic films, so I know where they’re coming from and what they want to achieve. It's less effective if we come in from a military standpoint, because battles are distilled down to their essence, but that's fine if we see them as merely points in the broader history. As a character-driven story, I was hooked. It's not a short book at over four hundred pages, but it's not one I wanted to put down.
And, of course, it's a success in looking at gender. It's very easy to read the story without any focus on that, given everything else going on. We can look at Zhu and Ouyang as merely characters with goals and this works. However, if we look at them with gender in mind, this works even better. The era in question had serious restrictions on women. There are slaves here and concubines. Multiple wives aren't uncommon for the powerful. Even if a woman marries into power and gains some for herself, she still can't take over her husband's role and becomes nothing if he dies. Given all that, having the two driving forces be a woman passing as male and a beautiful eunuch speaks volumes.
Bring on book two, 'He Who Drowned the World', which I see is even longer at almost five hundred pages, and any further books Parker-Chan might see fit to set in this universe. It's a great novel in any sense. It's especially great as a first novel. ~~ Hal C F Astell
|
|