Title: Three Souls Author: Janie Chang
Published: August 20, 2013
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 502
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:"We have three souls, or so I'd been told. But only in death could I confirm this ..." So begins the haunting and captivating tale, set in 1935 China, of the ghost of a young woman named Leiyin, who watches her own funeral from above and wonders why she is being denied entry to the afterlife. Beside her are three souls—stern and scholarly yang; impulsive, romantic yin; and wise, shining hun—who will guide her toward understanding. She must, they tell her, make amends.
As Leiyin delves back in time with the three souls to review her life, she sees the spoiled and privileged teenager she once was, a girl who is concerned with her own desires while China is fractured by civil war and social upheaval. At a party, she meets Hanchin, a captivating left-wing poet and translator, and instantly falls in love with him.
When Leiyin defies her father to pursue Hanchin, she learns the harsh truth—that she is powerless over her fate. Her punishment for disobedience leads to exile, an unwanted marriage, a pregnancy, and, ultimately, her death. And when she discovers what she must do to be released from limbo into the afterlife, Leiyin realizes that the time for making amends is shorter than she thought.
I’m not quite sure what to think about this book. It’s very, very well-written, and the story is engaging and haunting throughout. Afterlife-type books aren’t traditionally my go-to (see If I Stay), but Janie Chang’s Three Souls is really quite lovely. At the same time, I did get a tad bit bored in the middle section.
This novel has two major sections, plus a fairly open-ended epilogue. The first thing we learn is that Chang’s protagonist, Leiyin, has just died, but is not allowed to go on to the afterlife unless she atones for the mistakes she’s made. But first she needs to learn what her mistakes are. So, roughly 70% of Three Souls recounts Leiyin’s life between 1928 (when she’s 17) and 1935 (when she dies). This section is mostly traditional historical fiction fare, though Leiyin comments on her own life as she watches it. But the last 30% deal entirely with how Leiyin atones for the sins she’s committed—the idea being that if she saves enough lives, she will eventually be allowed to move on and reincarnate.
Though the severe divide between the two sections of Three Souls could in some ways make for a blocky, chopped-up storyline, I think Janie Chang managed to transition between to two major “storylines” very effectively, and thus gave the book a cohesive feel in spite of its set-up.
And even minus the ghost/paranormal plot point, Leiyin’s story would still be interesting on its own, if perhaps slightly less fulfilling. The favorite daughter of a rich, well-connected Chinese family, Leiyin is very spoiled and naive in many ways. When she encounters a liberal poet and Communist thinker, she develops a school-girl infatuation that lasts for the rest of her life. It’s interesting that over the 7 or 8 years the reader spends with Leiyin, Three Souls doesn’t show us much character development for her while she’s alive. It’s only in death that we see Leiyin mature in any real way. So, in that way, the paranormal aspect of this book is the most important, otherwise we’d have the story of a spoiled, unhappy young woman with too much education and too little common sense. But Chang was able to sort of redeem Leiyin’s character by having her ghost atone for the mistakes she made in life. And that, in and of itself, made for a pretty interesting (though somewhat shallow) exploration of Chinese mythology and tradition.
Though Chang never goes into much detail regarding specifics of Chinese beliefs concerning the afterlife, the picture Three Souls paints is quite interesting. Leiyin is joined in death by her three souls—yang, yin, and hun. Each soul has its own persona and relationship with Leiyin, and though they sort of guide her, mostly they’re just companions. I thought it was really interesting that Leiyin was separate from her souls, something else entirely. Most mythologies I’ve read about seem to believe that when a person dies, their soul is eternal and their body mortal. Yet here we have Leiyin as an eternal being, and she’s entirely divorced from her souls—a completely different entity from them. I do wish Three Souls had gone more into detail regarding those particulars, because now that I think about it more fully, it is kind of a strange idea, and I’d love to know more about it.
Mythology aspects aside, the storyline in this book is slow-moving and thoughtful, as Leiyin not only watches her life (literally) flash before her eyes, but also contemplates her choices after the fact. Three Souls is also quite long, and though the pace is never snappy, I also don’t think it ever dragged on for too long. My interest did flag somewhere around the middle, simply because I felt that the sections dealing with Leiyin’s fairly humdrum married life were slightly overemphasized, but then again, that almost-boring section did contrast nicely with other aspects of the text. As I mentioned before, Three Souls is very well-written, and Chang’s prose carried the reader along the story’s path nicely and fluidly, in a way that really brought the atmosphere of both Leiyin’s afterlife and early 19th century China into sharp relief.
Three Souls is a very nice, lovely book that takes the readers on a journey with ease. Janie Chang’s prose is masterful, and she easily crosses over between historical fiction and paranormal without too much confusion or stumbling. I very much enjoyed both the historical aspects of this book, and Leiyin’s development over time was rewarding. Altogether, I thought Three Souls shows talent on the author’s part, and though I doubt it will prove to be memorable in the long run, I still thought it was an excellent read.
