[easyazon-image align=”left” asin=”1594486107″ locale=”us” height=”160″ src=”http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515s1mROSoL._SL160_.jpg” width=”106″]Page 2: Chang-rae Lee – On Such A Full Sea
On Such a Full Sea, it turns out, isn’t about societal upheaval and heroic rebellion. It’s about something much smaller. It’s about Fan, the young protagonist who is quite literally small of stature. “She was tiny, was the thing,” the narrator reports, “not quite five feet tall, and slim besides . . . At sixteen she had the stature of a girl eleven or twelve.” And though this narrator claims at several points that she is nothing remarkable, “in terms of character, not terribly distinctive,” the plain fact of the book is that she is remarkable, is distinctive (3).
This same narrator describes the peculiar joy Fan took in her work as a diver, cleaning fish farm tanks in the B-Mor facilities:
. . . [S]he liked the feeling of having to hold her breath and go against her nature . . . She wasn’t inviting oblivion or even testing herself but rather summoning a different kind of force that would transform not her but the composition of the realm, make it so the water could not harm her. (6)
This very impulse, expressed in her every action, is precisely what makes Fan so remarkable, and precisely what animates the novel’s plot. Fan does the unthinkable. When her boyfriend, Reg, is disappeared by the authorities without explanation, Fan leaves B-Mor; she walks right out the front gate in hopeless pursuit of him. For a girl with no allies or resources—for anyone who spends her life walled-up in the warm and tidy order of the facilities—this certainly looks like, as the narrator states it, “inviting oblivion.”
But Fan will not succumb to oblivion, nor allow Reg the same fate, even when pressed and almost crushed in her labors to find him. She somehow navigates the lawless frontiers and the frontier law of the open counties and then the polished but rabid self-absorption of the Charters. And yet through this whole journey it feels as if she hardly moves. That initial, brilliant metaphor holds true; it is as if Fan is still sitting in a tank, holding her breath, not moved by the forces that press her but rather moving and changing them.
She has the unquenchable ability to provoke sympathy—not just pity, but a real aligning of feelings—from each character she meets, even the ones at cross purposes. And even if some of those characters manage finally to ignore or suppress their sympathy, no matter; their attempts to use Fan push her closer to, not further from, her goal. It seems that she very nearly succeeds in “transforming the composition of the realm” into her own personal providence.
Things are never easy for Fan; she’s always in some kind of danger, and most of all when all seems safe. But her resistance is tranquil, almost passive, gentle—again, gentle enough that it never approaches the tenor of rebellion that would fuel a more sanguine dystopian tale.
The rebellion, instead, almost comes from the masses left behind in B-Mor. The narrator, speaking always as a “we” that places him in B-Mor too, breaks away periodically from Fan’s progress to narrate the unrest she has curiously fomented. Small, random, reasonless acts (throwing trash in a pond, shaving one’s head) meant to show solidarity with Fan and Reg grow and connect until the whole city is gathered, swelled into such a full sea of people, of emotion, of nameless desire, that the reader thinks for a moment that the levees might not hold.
But no. “[I]t is a genuine surge,” the narrator professes, “and like all surges that rise up and tide and maybe threaten the bulwarks, it will eventually recede” (240). And it does recede; it ebbs away, just as it rose, quietly and unthinkingly. The city goes back to its normal life.
“We wish and wish and often with fury but never very deeply.” (6) This is the narrator’s cynical vision, spoken at the beginning and turned into prophecy by the end. And what did the B-Mors want, anyway? Liberty? Community? Did they simply want to want something for a while, to know what it feels like, before returning to their stale but satisfactory lives?
And what does Fan want? This question is no easier to answer. Perhaps love. Perhaps freedom. Certainly Reg, but as the narrator posits, it has to be more than that. “He was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. One person or thing can never comprise that” (61). It’s unclear in the end, though this can be said: Fan wants things to be different, and somehow better, and unlike nearly every other character, she doesn’t count the cost to herself.
Nor should you count the cost; wherever you find this book, buy it. Whatever its genre, Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea is a beautiful and memorable novel, and it belongs on your bookshelf to stay.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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