Academic

Books where one character makes all the difference

By Tung Yin

After being blown away by the epic movie "Red Cliff," I decided to read the historical novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," which encompasses the events in the movie and more.  It's a 14 century novel set from 180-260 AD in feudal China, about the warring between three tribes/countries.  The battle depicted in "Red Cliff" is actually only about 50 pages of the 1200+ pages in the 2-volume book!

Anyway, I almost gave up on the book during the first 200 pages, which were bloodsplattered coups where people were described as being hacked to pieces, all told in third person objective narration so that I had no real sense of what people were thinking.  Characterization was thin, with the "good guy" Liu Bei depicted as noble, honest, loyal, and the "bad guy" T'sao T'sao as power-hungry, deceitful, and evil.  However, around page 250 or so, Liu Bei went off to find a famous wise military strategist, Chuko Liang, and finally persuades Chuko to join his rebellion.

With Chuko, the reader finally gets access to someone's thinking, as the narration occasionally shifts to third person omniscient.  Chuko is full of clever military strategies, like sending ships full of uniforms stuffed with straw to act as targets for T'sao T'sao's forces, who riddle the uniforms with arrows -- just when Liu Bei's forces are short of arrows!  Over the course of the next several hundred pages, Chuko helps Liu Bei win various military battles, and the reader is spared the endless coups and hacking of people to pieces (though there's still a lot of beheading, death being one of the main punishments for any legal or military infractions).

Sadly, Chuko eventually dies 200 pages shy of the end of the book.  When I reached that point, I feared that without him, the book would devolve back to being boring.  I had some hopes that Chuko's protege, Chiang Wei, would carry on, and he did to some extent, but I was again subjected to coups and a return to the hacking of people to pieces.  I bore down and finished the book, but the end was not all that interesting.

Off the top of my head, I'm hard-pressed to think of another book where one character made such a big difference in my enjoyment of the reading.  I mean, I remember thinking that Bigwig was by far the most interesting character in "Watership Down," but it wasn't as if that novel was boring whenever he was off-screen.  Maybe Jack Shaftoe in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle . . . .  There's something to be said for first person narrators with distinctive voices, like Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler mysteries, or Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher in the Rye" -- they're always on the page!

Full post as published by The Yin Blog on June 02, 2010 (boomark / email).