What Is Fan's Family Ike in on Such a Full Sea?
Civilization
On Such a Full Sea past Chang-rae Lee
On Such a Full Bounding main: A Novel BY Chang-rae Lee. Riverhead Hardcover. Hardcover, 368 pages. $27.
Chang-rae Lee's new novel On Such a Full Sea takes its championship from a line in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in which the traitor, Brutus, refuses to believe that fate trumps free will: "On such a full body of water are we at present adrift / And we must accept the electric current when it serves / Or lose our ventures." Lee's protagonist, named Fan, draws on a like sense of purpose in the face of an outcome she seems all but destined to meet.
On Such a Full Sea is Lee'due south fifth novel in twenty years, and his first to depart from the experience of isolation and breach amongst immigrants. Here, the immigrants are portrayed equally the rightful residents, and saviors, of B-Mor, a foreign settlement representing all that remains of what used to be Baltimore. In this odd book set in an off-kilter projection of America, Lee tells a story that is neither a quest nor scientific discipline fiction nor dystopian romance.
The narrative vocalization, cast in the start person plural, is conceited in its collectivity. There is no clear villain responsible for the stratification of the nation and our heroine is almost deliberately uninspired. Nonetheless the disquieting genius of the volume lies in the seeming normalcy of the world it portrays. It all feels eerily plausible. Dialing dorsum to the nowadays solar day, who wouldn't want to forego his or her fierce individualism and settle into the simple arms of that narrative "we?" Aren't many of our mod mean solar day heroes a little lackluster already?
Information technology is the "we" of B-Mor who tell "the tale of Fan," the story of a xvi-year-former tank diver whose lifelong chore has been to await subsequently thousands of perfectly manufactured fish. The world as we know it at present is generations abroad from the people of B-Mor, whose ancestors from "New China" settled and rebuilt the city after its staggering social and economic plummet. The narrator's collective consciousness envelops the reader equally the plot glides through the fable of Fan'south journey across North America, a non quite post-apocalyptic wasteland, to observe her lover, Reg, who is likewise the male parent of her unborn child.
In the fated nowadays of Lee's novel, highly regulated labor facilities, such as the fish and vegetable factories of B-Mor, sustain the lavish lifestyles of the "Lease" villages—freakish hamlets reminiscent of Fritz Lang's City. All that exists betwixt the Charters and the labor facilities are the anarchic "open counties," the very thought of which inspires in residents "a swampy tingle in the underarms, a gaining chill in the gut."
We follow Fan as she leaves through the gates of B-Mor, afterward Reg is taken away when the government discover that he is mysteriously free of the disease, known as "C," that plagues the rest of the population. Alone and away from home for the commencement time in her life, Fan confronts the reality of the open counties, and finds herself in a outlying settlement called "The Smokes." Beaten and humiliated past Loreen, the matriarch of this area, Fan befriends the introverted leader Quig, who was excommunicated from his native Charter, an experience described as existence catapulted "beyond the Earth's pull, 1 form into the spectral chasm as probable as any other, all coordinates open up but potentially full of peril, each completely unknown."
From at that place, we trace Fan, Quig, and Loreen's expedition across the desolate Northeast, where they happen upon a family of acrobatic vegetarians, who drug and nearly gut Quig and Loreen in the hope of adopting Fan into their traveling circus. By far the most chilling finish on her path is Fan'southward unintended stay in the immaculately manicured Charter village of Seneca. After being traded every bit an indentured servant to Mister Leo and the mentally unhinged Miss Cathy, Fan is soon existence "kept" by Miss Cathy, forth with seven other girls, named One through Seven.
Throughout On Such a Total Sea, Lee's prose is filled with anxiety and existential malaise. His sentences move erratically from unearthly meditation and wonderment to accounts of the increasingly brutal incidents unleashed upon the protagonist. And although she is bold enough to overcome savagery, Fan is non a heroine in the traditional sense. Yes, she is just; yep, she is loyal; aye, she is unyielding in her conclusion. But the reader may still detect her exasperating as a character, admitting in familiar ways. We are forever waiting for her to take decisive action, to no avail. When ii of the girls poisonous substance themselves to give Fan encompass to escape from Miss Cathy, she simply stands aside and says, "I can't exit yet."
But in fact, Fan's inaction is something of a decoy, allowing the inner qualities of the people and places she encounters to emerge in both startlingly compassionate and deeply unsettling ways. We are reminded: "Often she remained silent, simply when she did speak, it seemed only forthright and sincere, which is why people responded to her in the way they did." It may be the result of her unobtrusive disposition that she becomes the only person with whom Quig feels comfortable sharing the gruesome story of his family's great fall from grace. Or, alternately, the reason her own blood brother perceives her as someone he has no problem betraying.
Fan'south laconic nature is frustrating at times. But the crux of the novel is the ease with which nosotros chronicle to her. In a way, she is null special. Lee seems immune to the notion that a dystopian hero must await and act similar the bow-slinging Katniss Everdeens of the world (a la Hunger Games). Thus, the novel's weight is felt non so much in the portrayal of the chilling hereafter that awaits our concrete earth, but rather in its rendering of the consciousness and humanity of the people who volition still be living there. Or more poignantly, as Lee writes, "Our tainted world looms within us, every i."
Aviel Kanter is a writer based in Brooklyn.
Source: https://www.bookforum.com/culture/on-such-a-full-sea-by-chang-rae-lee-12833
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