On Such a Full Sea (2014) by Chang Rae Lee

 Book Review

On Such a Full Sea (2014)

by Chang Rae Lee

  I read Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee's 1994 debut as part of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list, where it is part of the New York/Manhattan chapter.  I enjoyed Native Speaker, so when I saw he had written a dystopian-fiction/literary fiction cross-over book a decade ago, I checked out the B.D. Wong narrated Audiobook from the library.   I enjoyed the listening experience and I guess I would call On Such a Full Sea an interesting failure- again my own feelings were echoed by the contemporaneous review in the New York Times, by now Pulitzer Prize winning author Andrew Sean Greer.  I actually wanted to quote his paragraph of the state of dystopian sci-fi, literary-fiction cross over circa 2014:

Colson Whitehead, Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood (in her recently concluded MaddAddam trilogy) have all tackled this genre. Doris Lessing’s “Mara and Dann” is a classic, as is Anthony Burgess’s “Clockwork Orange.” Further back in time, one has only to think of Orwell, Huxley and Wells, even Jack London and Mary Shelley. -New York Times(paywall)

   Amazing that Greer would single out the MaddAddam trilogy at the expense of The Handmaid's Tale, but otherwise that's a good summary. I think you'd have to put Kazuo Ishiguro in there in 2024, but besides those two things.  

  If I had to focus on one reason On Such a Full Sea wasn't a hit, it would be the choice of the author to use a collective second person tense to narrate- as in the, story is told from the collective perspective of the citizens of B-more, a post collapse Chinese colony occupying the ruins of Baltimore.  The protagonist is Fan, daughter of B-more and a "tank diver"- someone tasked with maintaining the aqua-culture tanks that Bmore uses to cultivate fish which they then sell to the "Charters"- enclaves of wealthy post-Americans who exist largely cut off from both colonies like Bmore and the unorganized "counties"- which is a mild take on the Mad Max/The Road idea of society in the aftermath of a total collapse of government. 

  Fan's adventures start out after she leaves Bmore in search of her disappeared boyfriend, whose child she is carrying.  Because of the second person narrator, we never get inside Fan's head and her twin desires- to find her boyfriend hopefully via her brother, one of the few colonists who have been elevated to charter life, never separate out.   Time is a little imprecise because of Fan's adventures, but there is no denying that at the beginning of the book she knows she is pregnant, and by the end she is still pregnant and not one person has noticed, so we're talking a couple months tops. 

  But I thought the world building was interesting, and Lee is a no-doubt writer of literary fiction, so the overall quality level of the prose was very high. Not a book I would go around recommending, but I personally enjoyed the Audiobook experience.