Friday, September 3, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge (Trans by Jeremy Tiang)

 



Strange Beasts of China is a 2006 novel by Chinese author Yan Ge, translated this year into English by Jeremy Tiang.  It's a rather short novel, being listed on amazon as 240 pages (and that's probably an overcount), but not the type of novel that works well read quickly - the story relies on readers to make connections on their own to follow along rather than spelling things out.  It's basically a story about a fictional Chinese city in which humans live alongside "Beasts" - beings that are similar to humans in many ways and yet have various small or big physiological and cultural differences that mark them as different and result in different treatment.  

But Strange Beasts of China is more significantly a story about the book's human narrator, a woman trying to write a story about the various types of beasts, and noting how they're not so different from humans (or of course that humans are the real beasts), and who finds out truths about her own existence and past in the process.  The result is a novel that didn't quite work fully for me, with the book requiring seemingly a few connections that I didn't quite make very easily unlike the characters, with side characters or their actions disappearing from the narrative at various points, and which didn't quite really feel like a complete whole.  It's an interesting novel, and I think I appreciate what it was trying to do, but it just didn't really work for me.  

------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Yong'an City is a city not just of humans, but of Beasts of many types, who live amongst the humans in various places, subject to their own cultures, biological needs, and relations with humans.  Some kinds of beasts are endangered, some are mythological, and some are so common that everyone has seen one.  For me, well I studied the beasts under a famous professor of zoology until I couldn't take it anymore and I dropped out to become a novelist.  And after some successful romance novels, I decided to write a full book about the various types of beasts in the city, about the ways they are different from what people know.  

But what I discover is that the beasts are far different form what even I know, and in many ways the beast are far more human than even the humans of the city themselves.  And as I examine the stories of the various beasts, I discover that the beasts of the city are far more integrated into the lives of humans than I ever could have expected, including in my own life....in ways that will make me rethink everything I know.....  
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Pardon for the awkward first person plot summary, but I felt it was representative of the book, which takes place from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, as she attempts to document the various beasts of Yong'an.  Each chapter deals with a single type of beast, as the narrator encounters those beasts and learns more about them....and herself.  For by the middle of the book, and continuing through the end, this becomes pretty much more a story about the narrator herself than the beasts.  Notably, in what seems like a misstep, no beasts other than those discussed in a particular chapter ever show up, which makes less and less sense as the narrator's life perspective is changed by her encounters with the various beasts (you'd expect her to go back at times when possible).  

The best part of the book honestly are the various beasts, which have very creatively different attributes - many of which would be spoilers to reveal.  Unsurprisingly, as I mentioned even in the plot summary, it becomes clear that humans are no better than the beasts, especially as they exploit the various types for their own benefit and look down upon them for little reason whatsoever (for example the female of one type of beast can mate with humans and produce offspring, and becomes a status symbol for the rich and elite.)  In a very interesting choice, while the humans are often assholes in the story, the beasts are not innocent themselves, and are just as dangerous in return to the humans - sometimes even more dangerous than presumed by the general public, a fact made clear by the very first story dealing with "Sorrowful Beasts".  It keeps things from feeling predictable, as the reveals about the bests come about.

What didn't really work for me is how the book attempts to form a cohesive story out of the narrator's life, as she attempts to piece together how the beasts have impacted her own life and her past, and deals with her relationships to a gossip dealer Charlie, the professor who taught her zoology before she dropped out, her dead mother who took her to encounters with the beasts, and the professor's new young apprentice, who does his errand work for her.  Part of the problem is that some of the actions of various character doesn't stay constant between stories - so for example, the professor is an absolute asshole through the first few chapters....which is basically forgotten later as he turns out to be more of a mentor/father figure to the narrator she aches to learn more about.  A character who is important early and then has a prominent disappearance casts a shadow over the next chapter....only to then be seemingly forgotten.  And the reveals about the narrator's own life, and the beasts themselves to a lesser extent, often seem to require leaps of logic I couldn't quite make before the narrator then tried to explain/hint at them, which just left me confused more than anything else.  

The result is a book that's interesting and certainly trying to make a solid story out of the narrator's connection to the beasts, but one that didn't quite come together for me.  I wonder if the way the narrator's leaps of logic to conclusions that didn't work for me are a problem of translation more than the original text (or could be based upon logic that would make more sense in a Chinese cultural context than my own).  But for my own ability to read this book, it just didn't work.  

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