Friday, June 26, 2020

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Bond Undone by Jin Yong (Translated by Gigi Chang)


A Bond Undone is the second part of Jin Yong's "Legend of the Condor Heroes", the classic Wuxia (Chinese Kung Fu) story that is finally receiving an official English translation in the US.  I went into the first part - A Hero Born (review here) - not expecting much because while I've enjoyed the few Wuxia movies I've seen in the theaters, action sequences in novels are not my thing.  But instead I found a book that I enjoyed immensely, filled to the brim with outrageous Kung Fu feats and combat in a way that doesn't resemble the action sequences I expected, with a propulsive plot whose response to any change in situation is: Let's start a new fight!  It was so much damn fun, and I could see why and how it has inspired other works over the past 60-70 years - and it ended on a bit of a cliffhanger so I was eager to pick up the second novel fairly quickly.

A Bond Undone is more of the same - actually, it's emphasis on creating more and more ridiculous fighting situations is even more extreme....and that's a good thing!  This is not a novel where you expect some logical character development - the main romance/attraction sort of springs up out of nowhere - or a deep story: but it is one where kung fu is used in a million ways in fascinating, fun and often hilarious manners from start to finish, before (sigh) ending on another cliffhanger.  It does have some gender issues, but honestly not as bad ones as I expected from a 70 year old Chinese novel, and it's just so much fun, that I can't wait to pick up the third one.


Honestly, the plot summary is the least important thing here, so this'll be brief, but.....

-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-------------------------------------------------------
Guo Jing is still in terrible danger, inside the grounds of the evil Jin prince Wanyan Honglie, and the Kung Fu masters he has assembled there, where Guo Jing and Lotus Huang have stirred up an absolute hornet's nest:  the prince's consort has fled with her original husband, the prince's son revealed to be Guo Jing's fated blood brother, and Guo Jing having pissed off one of the masters in the process of stealing the antidote to the poison for the Taoist Monk who had helped him....(it's a long story).  And Lotus Huang finds herself caught between the rest of the masters, who are desperate to figure out her own Kung Fu origins....and to possess her for her beauty.

Escape will take everything they have, and may require aid from the most surprising of sources, and will put Guo Jing and Lotus Huang - now beloved to each other in their own hearts - on a path leading them to even more Kung Fu legends, such as the Five Greats, and to the book that contains the greatest Kung Fu secrets of them all, secrets that have inspired more bloodshed throughout history than any other.....
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Like I said, the plot is often above just an excuse to put characters into place to fight or to learn kung fu techniques at any given point in time, with something like 54 of the first 60 pages of the book being non-stop kung fu fighting between a large number of characters (and the other 6 pages being the Dramatis Personae).  Nearly everything that happens in this book can be split into one of three categories:  Kung Fu Masters - often numbering in the double digits - getting into massive brawls at once for various reasons; Guo Jing and Lotus Huang meeting new Kung Fu masters and convincing/tricking them to teach them new techniques; and Kung Fu Masters meeting and engaging in contests that are not fighting, but use the principles of Martial Arts in different ways.  These last segments are often incredibly fun and I won't spoil the surprise of what they are here.

These Kung Fu Masters are absolutely bizarre and eccentric with their own tics and styles, so you get the Beggar King - a master of the Beggan Clan - one of the five Greatest in all of China who is literally the king of beggars all throughout China, despite his great skills and is obsessed with being given free and delicious new foods.  You have the Viper of the West who well, comes with a ton of vipers.  You have more masters with disabilities - blindness, broken legs, etc - than you can shake a stick at.  Every type of Kung Fu master you've seen in movies/literature/TV, they're all here (and probably were inspired by here).  And they're all so much fun.

Into this world you have our protagonist Guo Jing and our secondary protagonist Lotus Huang.  In another book, I'd probably complain about this arrangement - Guo Jing is well, not an idiot, but slow on the uptake in everything: from street smarts to martial smarts to academic smarts.  It's literally his defining trait at times.  He learns Martial Arts through not his own persistence, but the persistence of the Masters and others he encounters: and it takes him far more work to figure things out than anyone else.  I'd normally complain that it's kind of sexist for him to be the protagonist compared to Lotus Huang, who is more skilled at Kung Fu to start this novel and is far far more intelligent (maybe the smartest character in the series?).  And yet the book generally doesn't relegate Lotus to a back role enough for me to care, and Guo Jing is so good hearted and ignorant at times it's hard not to appreciate him and root for him, as he inevitably, and often unconsciously gets stronger.  And as I mentioned before Lotus Huang is an absolute charm, in her quick thinking and great kung fu, so it's really fun to read her in action, and that's why one of the only disappointments in the book is the last act in which she sort of becomes a damsel in distress.

So yeah, given that I've seen gender problems pop up in modern Chinese SF/F, I'm not surprised to see them pop up here: not only do we see one prominent woman character commit suicide rather than be taken away again from the man she loves or Lotus Huang's own moment of becoming a damsel in distress in the final act, but the villains sigh - let's put it this way, the main recurring villain of this novel is known for abducting many many women (and wants to do the same to Lotus Huang) for his pleasure, even if he supposedly is above physically forcing them (but not above using pressure points to paralyze them for transport).  There are two other prominent women kung fu fighters in this series besides Lotus, and one spends this entire book pining after a probable bad guy instead of fighting (and is paralyzed in the one moment she apparently did fight off-page) and the other was a major antagonist previously and in this one breaks down emotionally repeatedly over her loss of her master and her husband (who may have taken her not by consent originally either).

These things are there, and they're annoying, and yet they're not nearly so bad as I've seen in other books so I could easily get past them for the fun: and still, Lotus Huang's intelligence and skills, as well as the other women, are given enough appreciation by the narrative - not just for her gender - that it's really not that bad.  Same with another issue with this book, that the romantic attachment Guo Jing and Lotus Huang feel for each other sprouts out from basically nowhere, it just isn't that big of a deal considering everything else we get here that it jars you from the narrative - I was able to roll with it and still have a ton of fun.

In short, this is perhaps even more fun than the first part of this series, and I can't wait to see where we go from here.
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