The Boat to Redemption
As seen:
By Su Tong and Howard Goldblatt
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1 review
Disgraced Secretary Ku has been banished from the Party – it has been officially proved he does not have a fish-shaped birthmark on his bottom and is therefore not the son of a revolutionary martyr, but the issue of a river pirate and a prostitute. Mocked by the citizens of Milltown, Secretary Ku leaves the shore for a new life among the boat people on a fleet of industrial barges. Refusing to renounce his high status, he maintains a distance – with Dongliang, his teenage son – from the gossipy lowlifes who surround him.
One day a feral little girl, Huixian, arrives looking for her mother, who has jumped to her death in the river. The boat people, and especially Dongliang, take her to their hearts. But Huixian sows conflict wherever she goes, and soon Dongliang is in the grip of an obsession for her. He takes on Life, Fate and the Party in the only way he knows . . .
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People in the group really struggled with this book, and in fact only two of us managed to finish it. It is "dense". Not much happens for at least the first third of the book but then the plot really gets going. I struggled through the beginning but then the hook went in and I found it more and more fascinating. Essentially it's an historical novel, set in a small riverside town in the 1960s and 70s, under the Mao regime. What kept me interested was that life wasn't what I thought it would be - less being carted off to gulags or sent to the south to labour as a peasant when you fall from grace - but instead domestic ostracism and internal banishment and what that does to people. So many themes to discuss, history, myth, the Cultural Revolution, belonging, what it means to be a man, points of view, the nature of stalking, identity ... it's a shame so much of the first half of the book is so slow. Left to my own devices I would have given this 4 stars and not 3, but didn't think that was a fair representation of the group's response to it.
