Burning God
Dec. 30th, 2020 12:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Burning God, R.F. Kuang, conclusion of the Poppy War trilogy (first, second). Confession: I skimmed the heck out of this book. So much mass death and atrocity and relentless bleakness and, like, my ability to read has cratered anyways, but I particularly did not want to be submerged in *this*, and yet, it popped after months in the library queue, so now was the time, for whatever I was going to manage to get out of it. (Or I suppose I could have re-queued for it, or, gasp, exchanged money for the convenience of reading it at a time of my choice and not during an arbitrary two-week period, but skimming now was the path of least resistance, so.)
My non-spoilery review is that now that it's finished, I would still recommend the trilogy as a whole, but with *loud caveats* about the graphic depiction of horrible things that are mostly based on things that really happened. Really do not read these if you are looking for a fun read.
Spoilery thoughts behind the cut.
So, in my comments about Dragon Republic, I said "God I hope it doesn't end with Rin launching the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I mean, if she's Mao, how else. (But maybe she gets to be a Mao who's saved by being a girl, or by her fascinating new soulbond, and who... manages to *stop* being Mao?)".
And... I guess... that is more or less what we got? In THE MOST TRAGIC POSSIBLE WAY?? I have to admit, I wasn't... caught up in it, probably from all the skimming. I can see how in the right mood it could have been big-T Tragedy, end of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon kind of business with the music going and you're sobbing your heart out in the theater, and instead I felt disappointed and annoyed that Kuang hadn't come up with something better, that this was her best solution, instead of, you know, immediately recognizing that this was surely where she had been deliberately driving the story from page one.
And then I frame-switched and most of my subsequent thoughts have been about the extent to which Kuang might be speaking to anyone in particular - like, this is a story about Fantasy China but the comments about surviving occupation might have a particular resonance for Hong Kong surviving occupation *by* China?? I mean, I am surely too ignorant to actually get all the nuances but ultimately this seems like a message of survival and endurance that could be about Asian-Americans dealing with white racism or could be about Hong Kong or, of course, could just be epic fantasy without any hidden meaning - I think Kuang complained in her Astounding acceptance speech about people talking about her fiction in terms of her identity - but, like, I think if you're going to write a trilogy that is so strongly informed by actual history, it's fair to read the ending as not just a way to finally wrench the story from the path of actual history, but as something relevant to the history unfolding right now.
I'll be very curious what she writes next.
My non-spoilery review is that now that it's finished, I would still recommend the trilogy as a whole, but with *loud caveats* about the graphic depiction of horrible things that are mostly based on things that really happened. Really do not read these if you are looking for a fun read.
Spoilery thoughts behind the cut.
So, in my comments about Dragon Republic, I said "God I hope it doesn't end with Rin launching the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I mean, if she's Mao, how else. (But maybe she gets to be a Mao who's saved by being a girl, or by her fascinating new soulbond, and who... manages to *stop* being Mao?)".
And... I guess... that is more or less what we got? In THE MOST TRAGIC POSSIBLE WAY?? I have to admit, I wasn't... caught up in it, probably from all the skimming. I can see how in the right mood it could have been big-T Tragedy, end of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon kind of business with the music going and you're sobbing your heart out in the theater, and instead I felt disappointed and annoyed that Kuang hadn't come up with something better, that this was her best solution, instead of, you know, immediately recognizing that this was surely where she had been deliberately driving the story from page one.
And then I frame-switched and most of my subsequent thoughts have been about the extent to which Kuang might be speaking to anyone in particular - like, this is a story about Fantasy China but the comments about surviving occupation might have a particular resonance for Hong Kong surviving occupation *by* China?? I mean, I am surely too ignorant to actually get all the nuances but ultimately this seems like a message of survival and endurance that could be about Asian-Americans dealing with white racism or could be about Hong Kong or, of course, could just be epic fantasy without any hidden meaning - I think Kuang complained in her Astounding acceptance speech about people talking about her fiction in terms of her identity - but, like, I think if you're going to write a trilogy that is so strongly informed by actual history, it's fair to read the ending as not just a way to finally wrench the story from the path of actual history, but as something relevant to the history unfolding right now.
I'll be very curious what she writes next.
