The Boat to Redemption

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.