Review: The Surrendered

The Surrendered, by Chang-Rae Lee. Photo / Supplied

Thirty years after the Korean War, an American veteran and an Asian woman are still confronting the conflict that briefly brought them together. June Han was 11 in the early 1950s, trying to protect her younger brother and sister as they fled from the fighting that killed the rest of her family. Hector Brennan was a dashing young GI who helped June survive.

Along with them goes "stubborn, jade-eyed" Sylvie Tanner, who helped run the Korean orphanage where June finds shelter. Brennan and the girl both become obsessed by doom-laden Sylvie (a lot of characters come laden with doom). As the story shuttles between Italy and the United States in the 80s, and Korea three decades earlier, all three work through traumas of grisly death (there's a lot of that) from their pasts.

So we meet June in early middle age, running an antiques shop in Manhattan, still "extraordinarily youthful", in search of her errant son. Brennan, meanwhile, has drifted from woman to woman and job to aimless job before he meets her again.

Lee's previous three novels have met with rapturous reviews, so it's with much apprehension that I find myself labelling this one flabby and florid.

The plot is lurid with the horrors that people inflict on others and/or themselves. Even minor characters carry buckshot in the neck or are set to geld someone with a steak knife. The welter of graphic deaths and mutilations persists to the final pages.

The writing is adjectival, ornate, stuffed with portentous images. It's a dense, sometimes laborious, read. The author points out everything. People don't talk; they exchange significant statements. They don't make love; they "had fallen on each other in a primal, over-desperate state, and in a matter of minutes they had clawed and tasted one another with the privation of ghouls". Oh dear.

I acknowledge the power of the subject, the major motifs of mercy, courage and redemption, the complexity of the main characters. I just wish it had been written with much less pretentiousness and much more clarity.

* The Surrendered, by Chang-Rae Lee, Little, Brown $38.99.