Review | Korean author Cheon Myeong-kwan’s International Booker shortlisted ‘Whale’

Pachinko, the TV series based on a best-selling book of the same name by Korean American writer Min Jin Lee, might be rocking it, but for now it’s Cheon Myeong-kwan’s Whale that’s broken through the surface of the ocean of stories with a magical power, that only a Rushdie can command.

It’s almost 20 years since Kwan achieved instant recognition in South Korea with his debut novel, titled Whale in its English translation, brilliantly rendered by Chi-Young Kim. Now that he’s been pulled ashore by being short-listed for the International Booker Prize 2023, it’s certain that he’s already won what he lacked before — international recognition. It’s a book that hooks you by the nose. It floods your senses with a certain voluptuous intensity alternating with the pungent odour of dried fish and human desire in all its manifold variations. Without in any way impugning their literary qualities, if Pachinko falls into the Mills & Boon genre, Whale belongs within a more strident manga tradition.

Cheon Myeong-kwan’s Whale

A sprawling narrative

One can only compare Kwan to Mervyn Peake, the manically-brilliant British writer born in China to missionary parents in the early part of the 20th century. Peake, who channelled his experiences as a child fleeing the collapse of Chinese life before the tsunami of Mao Tse-tung, into the first three parts of his unfinished series of novels Gormenghast, once wrote: “As I see it, life is an effort to grip before they slip through one’s fingers into oblivion, the startling or the ghastly or the blindingly exquisite fish of the imagination before they whip away on the endless current and are lost forever in oblivion’s black ocean.”

What if we sit watching an endless cycle of films along with cinephile Geumbok, the feisty heroine, and discover that oblivion’s black ocean is actually a darkened cinema theatre? Will the imagination be colonised by the gigantic whale of Hollywood images? If Geumbok is not taken up by John Wayne at first, there are others like the cigar-chomping Godfather, who inhabit the text in different guises. Kwan unleashes a tide of feral characters, many of them women with an almost primal hunger for survival that are plucked from the landscape of his imagination that ranges from a small village in a remote mountain valley to a fishing village in South Korea. Equally, they could be from anywhere, small villages across the planet dreaming of crossing into the promised land of whale-sized aspirations.

Or as Kwan writes: “As they sat in cafes, chatting and wasting time, relationships among people grew more complex and they got into more arguments, and to work out misunderstandings or make up with each other, people spent even more on alcohol and coffee, accelerating consumption. Emptiness began to creep into people’s hearts and Geumbok made more money from this phenomenon. This was the law of capitalism.” (Page 197).

South Korean writer Cheon Myeong-kwan | Photo Credit: instagram.com/eyesmag

Riding the crest of fantasy

Unlike Peake, who could only command a cult following, Kwan’s novel holds you in thrall. It will not be giving anything away to describe how there is even a Disney-style elephant called Jumbo, retired from a circus travelling through Korea, who communicates with Geumbok’s verbally-challenged daughter Chunhui. In one of the more lyrical passages, Jumbo points out the fragile blue marble of planet Earth of Carl Sagan’s imagery, floating through space.

Kwan himself has confessed that once he wrote the first chapter, the rest of the story appeared to him like listening to a voice being dictated in his ear. The images that he conjures travel through several life-spans of, and trajectories of, the often cataclysmic changes that have rocked the Korean peninsula, bifurcated by the Communist North and the American flavoured South with its reliance on the capitalist model.

There are several references to generals wearing dark glasses and medals who could be from either side of the border. In a totalitarian state, Kwan would have been reviled as an enemy of the people and thrown into jail as many of his characters tend to find themselves in Part Three in the novel. Though it is these very people to whom Kwan has given a voice.

What is remarkable in his narrative is that despite the tidal wave of misfortunes that engulf the characters it is not a victim narrative, nor one that blames the barbarians at the gate. It looks within. What it reveals is a valley filled with wild flowers and the promise of a scented breeze filling the air with the enchantment of stories.

The writer is a Chennai-based critic and cultural commentator.