On such a full sea

Lee's prose is really beautiful and poetic. He made the novelty of narration by a collective ‘we' feel natural in the story; having said that though, the narration also felt inconsistent - at times its voice was recanting the story as if it was a folk tale, other times switching to omniscience, always keeping the reader at a distance from the main character. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but the ‘this is what we know of these events' voice vs ‘omniscient voice when convenient' felt a bit too much like slack editorial oversight.

The passivity of the main character is my main problem with the story. It was very hard to see just why other characters felt so much for Fan and wanted to further her despite her passivity. I expected this to be a typical quest narrative, but I'm not sure if this is an ingenious take on it with a message of the futility of trying too hard, or a failure to execute one of the simplest classical narratives in an engaging way (which is pretty had to pull off in a quest narrative! just ask any investigative journalist). Either way it didn't convince me, and large parts of the story felt completely redundant (although the quality of Lee's prose redeems them to some extent).

I'm not usually a fan of dystopian fiction, but this one drew me in without ever having to explain how things came to be the way they were. (As a writer, I imagine that Lee wrote reams about what happened–climate change, pollution in China that caused so many migrants to move, more cancer causing pollutants everwhere, and so on–but then deciding that the reader didn't really need to know all that background to engage with the story.) Told in the first person plural from the point of view of the community from which young Fan has fled in search of her boyfriend, Reg, the diction and voice are fabulous. Fan is on a quest and we willingly follow her misadventures. The title of the book is taken from a speech by Brutus in Julius Caesar. (I read parts of this and listened to the whole audio book, narrated wonderfully by B.D. Wong.)

This is a haunting story about a young woman, Fan, who sets out from her relatively safe home in what used to be Baltimore in search of her boyfriend, who has disappeared. The dystopia she moves in is highly structured in its settled areas, but pretty much a free-for-all in the “counties” between settlements. The story is about both Fan's journey and the after effects of her departure on the psyches of people in B-Mor, told by an enigmatic, anonymous narrator in B-Mor. There are themes of safety and security vs. vulnerability to harm, integrity in relationships between people, and what conditions people will accept to ensure stability in their lives.

I have more to say but will have to try to fill out this review later.

It could be a dystopian quest novel. Certainly our hero Fan, leaving the confines of B-Mor encounters her fair share of adventures once she sets out for the open counties in search of her lover Reg. But the narrator, with his overly considered, first-person plural keeps intruding in on the action before it slips back into the story.

Maybe I'm supposed to read this as a meditation on our own class structure. How precarious our middle class lives are, bookended by the hand-wringing psychosis of the upper class and the savagery of the lower - but maybe I'm just burned out from dystopian fiction.

I was absolutely hooked on this novel from the first chapter. From the unreliable narrator to the plucky, mystifying heroine, this world had me in it's grip and didn't let go. It was surprising to me that the writing was so good - I don't often include genre fiction in the same category as literary fiction. This was a fascinating blending of the two. As such, it was at times not as plot-heavy as some genre readers might want, but I found myself completely enthralled. The ending was heartbreaking and yet hopeful, with plenty of unanswered questions to keep readers thinking after the last page had been turned. Another that could definitely be on my list of favorites this year.