This is a good book but my enjoyment of it progressed quite patchily. Initially, it was a little stilted and it took me a while to engage with the characters in the boarding house in Korea. Reasonably quickly, the book became more vivid and engaging as the characters and the narrative developed. It remained this way for majority of the book but I felt like my connection to the book began to unravel around two-thirds to three-quarters of the way through. As the book moves through the 100 odd years of history it covers, the generations inevitably multiply until I felt like I didn’t really have any connection or interest in the new characters that were being introduced. This reminded me of ‘100 Years Of Solitude’ a bit but the proliferation of characters and subsequent confusion aren’t as extreme as they are in Gabo’s classic. However, the quality of some of these characters did deteriorate later on in the book and this is not something I remember thinking about ‘100 Years Of Solitude’. Unlike the core characters whose personalities are build up slowly and at an enjoyable pace, the later characters feel rushed and haphazard. They’re less skillfully drawn and didn’t live up to the high standard I had come to expect from the book’s earlier passages. In this sense I feel the book is too long and that the latter sections aren’t as good as those in the middle. I thought I’d come up with a witty analogy for this book insofar as it is a tiny bit slow to get started, then really good and then becomes a bit of slog by the end. Unhelpfully, I have since forgotten the analogue! Was it going for a really long run? Was it the trajectory of enthusiasm for a new hobby or such like? Who knows? Who cares?
Besides the deterioration in quality as the book progresses, one of my biggest gripes about this book was the author’s use of dialogue as a vehicle for narrative. I’m generally of the opinion that dialogue is so hard to get right that less is usually more. More specifically, if there has to be dialogue it should definitely not be used to convey pieces of narrative to the reader. This almost always results in the dialogue becoming very clunky and I struggle to remember examples where it’s been done well. In a film or play, where options are limited, I can understand the need to have characters revealing parts of their backstory or narrative via dialogue but in a book I don’t see why the narrative can’t be kept in the prose, which avoids almost unbelievably clunky phrases like, “You’re leaving me in ten minutes to meet him. You do this on the first of the month.” I use this example from quite late on in the book as I happened to have highlighted it but the book’s opening passages has many other examples. Given that it always sounds so bad, I don’t see the reason or benefit of using dialogue in this way.
Sunja’s story is the best part of the book in my opinion. Her love affair with Hansu, her pregnancy with Noa, her marriage to Isak, their journey to Japan, their subsequent lives as Christian Korean immigrants and the birth of her second child are all engaging and well portrayed. This section of the book deals skillfully with a whole heap of interesting topics like marriage and infidelity, immigrant life, the Second World War, poverty, illness, religion and identity. The relationship between the half brothers Noa and Mosazu is another high point and is an interesting commentary on life as native born sons of immigrants. In spite of this richness, it never feels heavy handed and the story continues with admirable fluidity and pacing. The fact that Hansu remains an important part of the family’s life even after Sunja has rejected his offer to be his mistress adds a lot of complexity and interest. Whether or not this is ultimately beneficial for her and her family is debatable and seemed one of the central questions of the novel. In one practical sense, Hansu saves them from almost certain death by moving them to the countryside during the bombing of Osaka. On the other hand, it is the existence of this secret, illicit father and benefactor that seems to precipitate Noa’s suicide. Sunja appears to reconcile herself to these facts with reference to Christianity saying, “In the moments before her death, her mother had said that this man had ruined her life, but had he? He had given her Noa; unless she had been pregnant, she wouldn’t have married Isak, and without Isak, she wouldn’t have had Mozasu and now her grandson Solomon. She didn’t want to hate him anymore. What did Joseph say to his brothers who had sold him into slavery when he saw them again? “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” This was something Isak had taught her when she’d asked him about the evil of this world.” There are a lot of Christian characters in this book and while it is true that most of them are portrayed as good and kind, with the possible exception of Yacob in the later stages of his life, I wouldn’t say it was an overtly Christian novel. As with most of the themes, it’s handled sensitively enough not to encroach on the story although Christianity is given a benign treatment overall.
I was left a bit confused by Noa’s decision to kill himself rather than be reunited with his family. It seemed to me to be quite out of character for the scholarly and talented lover of literature who I would have expected to have a more nuanced understanding of identity, honour and status. Furthermore, he appears to love his mother and brother earlier in the book and has a family of his own when he commits suicide. The only conclusion I could draw was that he must have been utterly devastated by the discovery that he was illegitimate child to the point that this feeling overwhelmed all competing and contrary sentiments. I also felt perhaps someone else might have noticed the similarities between them earlier or found out about the story another way. I would probably locate Noa’s later life alongside the later characters in terms of their quality. By the time Noa kills himself, I felt like the book had already started to unravel in terms of narrative structure and character development.
Alongside Noa’s suicide, there are increasingly outrageous and hastily sketched plot developments. A character whose identity I can’t recall has a sexual awakening in a cemetery and, for good measure, also finds her husband there sodomising a male prostitute! I think it is Mosazu’s school friend the policeman’s wife. This school friend hardly plays a role up to this point and doesn’t feature after it either. Whoever it is, the scene feels rushed and disconnected from the rest of the book. Equally, the characters of Solomon, Mosazu’s son, and his girlfriend’s daughter, Hana, have the same feeling of an afterthought. When I compare them to the earlier parts of the book where Isak, Sunja, Kyunghee and Yoseb struggle with poverty and racism while attempting to raise children and remain faithful to their religion it feels like a different book altogether. The characters feel so hastily thrown together and the narratives that surround them feel like they have been cooked up by someone running out of ideas but still wanting those ideas to carry maximum shock value. The earlier parts of the book are nowhere near as attention seeking and gaudy. The earlier characters are painstakingly built up over long stretches. The later ones feel like they have been crammed into as few pages as possible with half baked, lurid plots to match.
Solomon is probably the best example of this. There isn’t much information about him until it is time for him to take part in two equally bad parts of the plot. First, he sleeps with his father’s girlfriend’s daughter Hana - shock, horror, taboo - and the daughter then proceeds to go off the rails and become a hostess / prostitute in Tokyo and die young - shock, horror, taboo. Secondly, he is involved in a really badly drawn investment banking storyline that serves no real purpose except to reinforce ideas about racism which are made far more poignantly and skillfully in other places. For instance, Isak’s imprisonment or Isak and Mosazu’s experiences growing up. The scenes from high finance never really ring true and seem to me to be well outside of the author’s area of expertise. The clunkiest part is probably the poker game he plays with his colleagues. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author had never played poker. The rules are set out but then ignored as Solomon hits a full house by discarding two cards and receiving two unwanted ones from his neighbour. Nevermind that the author has, only a page or so earlier, told us that next each player must give away a further card! The fact that the rules are mentioned only then to be completely ignored was really sloppy. This section also suffered from the, not unusual but completely false, presentation of poker as a game that a skillful player can win or lose at will. To anyone who has played even a small amount of cards, this is a ludicrous and wholly inaccurate simplification. I really wonder why this section was in the book at all as it is so badly done.
There is a tension between worldly characters, like Hansu and Mosazu, and more idealistic, often religious, characters like Isak, Noa and Yoseb. Both are presented in positive and negative lights and this even handed treatment is one of the book’s stronger points. I found myself quite drawn to the misanthropic, somewhat nihilistic and highly individualistic philosophy espoused by Hansu. This is probably best summarised by a passage of dialogue he delivers, “I’m a businessman. And I want you to be a businessman. And whenever you go to these meetings, I want you to think for yourself, and I want you to think about promoting your own interests no matter what. All these people—both the Japanese and the Koreans—are fucked because they keep thinking about the group. But here’s the truth: There’s no such thing as a benevolent leader. I protect you because you work for me. If you act like a fool and go against my interests, then I can’t protect you. As for these Korean groups, you have to remember that no matter what, the men who are in charge are just men—so they’re not much smarter than pigs. And we eat pigs. You lived with that farmer Tamaguchi who sold sweet potatoes for obscene prices to starving Japanese during a time of war. He violated wartime regulations, and I helped him, because he wanted money and I do, too. He probably thinks he’s a decent, respectable Japanese, or some kind of proud nationalist—don’t they all? He’s a terrible Japanese, but a smart businessman. I’m not a good Korean, and I’m not a Japanese. I’m very good at making money. This country would fall apart if everyone believed in some samurai crap. The Emperor does not give a fuck about anyone, either. So I’m not going to tell you not to go to any meetings or not to join any group. But know this: Those communists don’t care about you. They don’t care about anybody. You’re crazy if you think they care about Korea.” I found it hard not to agree with most of what he says. However, at the same time, there is a sense in which Hansu is responsible for suffering because he doesn’t spend enough time thinking about other people’s interests or ‘the group’ as he puts it. Alternatively, Noa and Isak both suffer for their principles and beliefs in a way that seems absurd to a pragmatist like Hansu. However, these same principles seem to lead them to a more disciplined and happier personal relationships. The ultimate cost of Hansu’s ruthless self-interest may be Noa’s suicide and all the misery that goes with it. The book itself appears to reserve judgement and, if anything, probably suggests that such judgements are beyond the scope of human understanding; as expressed in Sunja’s concluding thoughts quoted above.
Some of this book is really excellent but I feel like it overstretched itself in terms of length, historical scope, number of characters and storylines. The core story of Sunja, her family before her and her sons after her, are well paced and well written. The narrative functions independently as a good story with good characters and also as an example of far larger forces like war, race and poverty. Later on, the story becomes too lurid with too many hurried characters. These characters aren’t much good as stories on their own and nor do they add much to the general themes that are already extensively covered in other parts of the book. If I was the editor I would have tried to cut a good portion of the last couple of hundred pages as I think it clouds and confuses an otherwise excellent narrative and set of characters.
