Title: On Such a Full Sea Author: Chang-rae Lee
Published: January 7, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 352
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in.
In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class - descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China - find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.
In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
On Such a Full Sea is not a story in the sense of the word that most people are familiar with. There’s a main character, but plot progression is kept to a minimum, and it seems that this character serves only as a vehicle with which Chang-rae Lee can explore this futuristic society he’s envisioned. Not to say this is a necessarily bad way of writing a book, but to start reading this book expecting any sort of plot or character growth would be to set oneself up for disappointment in the end.
If this novel resembles anything, it feels like one-part fable and one-part social exploration. Fan’s (the main character’s) journey through this future world is told to us by a collective group of unnamed storyteller’s who are probably imagining and/or filling in the blanks. No one really knows what happened to Fan, after all. It’s strange to read a book where it’s unknown if the story is true or not (within the author’s fictional construct). That uncertainty gives On Such a Full Sea a very strange atmosphere to it. While reading, it’s easy to imagine a bunch of people gathered around the future-dystopian equivalent of a campfire, telling stories about Fan and the places she went.
The thing with Fan as a protagonist, however, is that she’s not really a character. She’s not a fully-developed person with characteristics and motivations. She is, as I’ve said, simply the tool Lee uses to show readers around this vision of the United State’s he’s created. In a way the narrators of the text acknowledge this: “The funny thing about the tale of Fan is that much of what happened to her happened to her.” Things happen to Fan, but she is not a proactive person who does anything about her situation. She leaves home, but then is swept on the tide of other people’s needs. Through her, we can observe different social classes and living situations, but Fan herself is just the eyepiece.
I think that normally, I would be annoyed by Fan’s lack of…anything. Yet On Such a Full Sea is not a character-driven or story-driven novel, nor does it really pretend to be. Lee seems much more occupied with discussing different economic/social systems and their pros and cons. The reader is given a very nice tour of this future world, and it’s definitely interesting. However, the author doesn’t appear to be concerned with establishing how this future world came to be, and Fan’s purpose in this story isn’t to overthrow the dystopian government. She merely observes. I find all this to be a very unique take on dystpian science fiction-y writing.
All this, of course, is helped by Lee’s very lovely, introspective prose. His writing makes the reflective tone of this book more palatable. Because we don’t know if Fan’s story is true, things are somewhat dreamlike, nearly surreal. The reader can follow along with Fan as she moves from place to place, and the reader can be interested in the places and how they’re portrayed because it’s obvious that is the major highlight of the text.
As I said, On Such a Full Sea is not the sort of novel one is used to, but neither is it bad. I enjoyed it a lot (as maybe a one-time thing; if all books were like this, I’d be annoyed). Lee’s writing quite strong and serves the fable-like atmosphere of the text very well. This is a very different kind of dystopian novel, but it’s worthwhile for those who are willing to deal with some potentially difficult narrative aspects.
