Dystopian novels are all the rage, but for every Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Handmaid’s Tale, there are countless second-rate imitations – worlds of as little substance as a flimsy theatrical stage set with eager grips on hand ready to shout “Strike the show” and move in for disassembly. So, too, the disconcerting experience of being plunged headfirst into an uncanny marriage of the familiar and the alien can so often be the hallmark of the dystopian reading experience; getting one’s bearings becomes the reader’s first and foremost task – reading as an orientating challenge.
For authors to allow their readers to immerse themselves fully in the brave new world of their making without the necessity of elucidatory water wings is a rare talent and one that deserves significant praise.
The acclaimed Korean-American novelist Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is set in a future America, the land of which is segregated between wealthy “Charter” towns, worker colonies and the wild, dangerous “counties” between them
Lee’s heroine, the 16-year-old Fan, is a tiny, lissom creature who spends her days encased in a black neoprene suit, “a sleek dark seabird knifing through the waters” of the fish tanks of B-Mor, the worker colony once known as Baltimore.
The experience of reading the novel is not dissimilar to Fan’s daily underwater excursions – a smooth, swift slide into the depths of an unknown world, as seamless and undulating as one could wish.
Fan’s ancestors hail from New China, the villagers transported from the uninhabitable wasteland that was eventually all that remained of the once prosperous nation; entire valleys within which everything was “slowly scorching, all the rubber and plastic and alloys, all of what little wood remained, all the rotting food and garbage, the welling pools of human and animal wastes, such that in the end it was as though the people themselves were burning, as if from the inside, exuding this rank, throttled breath that foretold of a tortuous lingering demise”. Fear not, though, this kind of stock dystopian description is few and far between in the novel.
She and the other inhabitants of B-Mor provide the food to feed a polluted and ailing world – the privileged Charter towns, home to the great and the good, receiving the cream of the various crops: the “valuable” fish that Fan nurtures and husbands, and the ripest vegetables harvested by her boyfriend Reg.
But one day, without warning or explanation, Reg goes missing. Why? No one can say, but it seems eminently likely that the rumour that he’s “C-free” – immune to an extremely prevalent and deadly disease – has made him the prey of a pharma-corp. Fan, in the knowledge that she’s carrying her lover’s child, leaves the closely monitored comfort of B-Mor, with its “seasonally perfumed, filtered air and the honey-hued halo lighting and the constantly updated mood-enhancing music”, and sets out to find him.
Her astonishing journey takes her through the lawless, dangerous counties to the sanitised security of a Charter town where she’s sold into a form of slavery – “quartered in a literally hobbling protective custody” with seven other girls, each with “identically altered eyes”, huge discs of doe-like black pools made to resemble those of anime characters, kept liked cosseted pets, their job to sooth and settle their anxious mistress – to a reunion with a long-lost brother and a denouement of shockingly chilling proportions.
Fan’s certainly no Katniss Everdeen – an obvious and easy comparison to draw. Her fate is more perilous, buffeted about by the actions of the characters around her, and her quest blinkeredly personal. Nevertheless, there’s an epic quality to Lee’s novel, from the chorus of “B-Mors” who narrate the tale, to the lyricism and beauty of his writing. The “steady, drenching sorrow” of grief; the description of a dying girl – “Her pupils stretched wide, space black, the whole of her looking as if every drop of her blood were turning to plainest paint”; or a broken man, “not shedding tears but shuddering very finely, as if he were earthen inside and loosely caked and just about to shear”, all unforgettably moving. The world created in On Such a Full Sea is both awesome and terrifying, and Fan’s story completely captivating.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
