Gripped by a past that won't let go

FICTION: The Surrendered By Chang-Rae LeeLittle Brown, 469pp, £12.99:  Inspired by his own father's experience of the Korean War, Chang-Rae Lee's latest novel anatomises the guilt felt by survivors of horrific events

A DAMAGED, DANGEROUS child becomes a damaged, dangerous woman. June experiences wartime in Korea, watches her family die before her eyes, and not so much survives as endures. Korean-American Chang-Rae Lee’s demanding fourth novel opens with a chapter of such horrific beauty that the reading of the narrative, intense and relentless, immediately settles into an endurance test.

This is a story that is both strange and familiar – frequently it becomes possible to predict what is going to happen next, if only because Lee succeeds in bringing his reader with him on a journey that is shocking, even inevitable.

There are several strong characters, each troubled. Nothing is easy for any of them. The world they inhabit is unforgiving. The dominant figure is June, first seen as an orphaned young girl fleeing for her life with her younger sister and brother.

The first 30 pages of this novel are so brilliantly written that to read them is like running a race that leaves one gasping for breath. The three children are on a train and suddenly it buckles, causing fatal juries. Before this, June had already seen her mother being beaten as June’s elder sister, disguised as a boy to protect her from the Japanese soldiers, is about to be raped. The elder girl and the mother battle, and just when it seems they have defied the soldiers, the truck in which they are sitting, comforting each other, explodes.

Memories of this are fresh in June’s mind as she realises her little sister has died in the train crash and her brother, having lost his foot, is bleeding to death in her arms. June knows she can’t help him, but she can save herself.

Chang-Rae Lee, author of Native Speaker(1995), A Gesture Life(1999) and the outstanding cross-cultural Aloft(2004), is a fine writer, but nothing he has published to date quite prepares one for the power of this grim study of need, desire and the torment of emotional paralysis.

Flash-forward 30 years and the young girl has become a capable middle-aged woman who appears to have prospered in New York, “the city of her solitude”. She appears to be preparing for a move. The journey is the last act of June’s life; she is dying. Lee is careful, handling this strange, cold and despairing character as if she were made of glass. Widowed and self-contained, she seems competent and remote. Information is released slowly by the subtle flow of a tap. June had had a son, Nicholas, not by a man referred to as her husband. June shows polite kindness to the young building superintendent, Habi, and wants to give him furniture and money. Her preparations include hiring a detective to find her son, to whom she sends money, the only reason he contacts her.

But there is another person to be found: Hector. The dying June recalls her young self at a time when she was also in danger of death, but from starvation and thirst, not a rampaging cancer. Young June had been saved by a US soldier; himself damaged and remote, he threw some gum at her and she followed him to safety.

Lee’s dark, formal prose is well-honed, at times rather stiff, yet not so much as to distract from the urgency driving a complicated narrative that hovers towards melodrama and does rely on a steady run of disasters. Once they have served their narrative purpose, two characters are killed off in the same accident. But it is easy to overlook these potential weaknesses, such is Lee’s extraordinary study of June as a dying woman fighting her body as it weakens. She emerges as an individual who, having made one desperate stab at an emotional connection, retreats into angry self-preservation.

Hector, her saviour, is also her rival for the love of an unhappily married woman, herself the survivor of an unspeakable drama in which both her missionary parents were murdered as she watched in a dream-like ordeal of killing that stretched out over several hours. Sylvie returns to the US from South Korea, and in an act of history repeating itself, marries a missionary and returns to Korea, where she soon falls into childless despair.

The sheer level of human agony, emotional and physical, that Lee, to date a master of restraint, brings to this novel of many stories, is epic in scale. The ambition is impressive, as is the artistic integrity, but so too is the effort. Yes, this is a laboured work, a labour of love, one inspired by that remarkable opening sequence, itself based on an experience during the Korean War that Lee’s father finally shared with him.

June, Hector and Sylvie are all connected through shared emotions that are ultimately more destructive than protective. They don’t interact so much as collide with each other. Most of their drama together is acted out in the orphanage run by Sylvie and her husband. There, June learns all she will ever need to know about hope and betrayal. The weight of symbolism is oppressive, if convincing largely because Lee is not only responding as a storyteller – he adds a compellingly human philosophical dimension to it all.

There are many moments of unnerving clarity; Lee’s central characters, particularly June and Hector, are both broken and elevated by the self-realisation they arrive at. Sylvie is, interestingly, for all her turmoil, equally real as she inhabits a chaos of drug-induced awareness of duty versus desire. Both she and June explore a desperation that Lee makes so real it is possible to touch it. Late in her illness, June has come to believe that love has “no such power”.

Details that shape lives and write personal histories float to the surface. When June finally, with the assistance of her reluctant detective, tracks down Hector, she first meets his current girlfriend, Dora, a convincingly drawn middle-aged woman who thinks she has finally found love. This scene, one of the most vivid in a novel of strong scenes, many of them violent, is a ballet of mixed emotions. It ends in a struggle during which Dora suddenly realises that June, who is such a threat, is actually dying.

In spite of – or perhaps, as Lee intends, because of – the admittedly overly stage- managed accident, June sets off for Europe on her quest for her son, and also for a symbolic place, with Hector. Long connected through a series of events, June and Hector are ultimately symbolically united.

The Surrenderedis not an easy novel, and will probably win the Pulitzer Prize. Driven, relentless and weighted by the turmoil of characters whose lives are destroyed by guilt, it is a lamentation. Yet it is also a study of how lives evolve, particularly when the past has no intention of either forgiving or of letting go. Nor will this novel.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Timesand author of Second Readings: from Beckett to Black Beauty, published by Liberties