Last time, I wrote about how much I love Nghi Vo and how much I absolutely hate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the base text for her novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful. The texts are far enough apart that my dislike of the source shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does, and this is because I can be petty and small at certain times. It’s a character defect.
However, I have no such reservations or troubles with the Cleric Chih adventures, which begin with the (so far the best) novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune. This book is followed by When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, Into the Riverlands, Mammoths at the Gate, The Brides of High Hill, and, most recently, A Mouthful of Dust. The next book, A Long and Speaking Silence, will be released in May and, yes, I’ve already preordered it. (If you have authors you love, preordering their books helps them immensely, but only do it if you can afford to.)
The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a masterful marriage of folklore and history (okay, imagined history, but in the narrative, history nonetheless) as Chih and their neixin Almost Brilliant, a hoopoe with a memory that preserves everything it sees and hears, untangle the story behind an imperial coup. It would be more accurate to say that Rabbit, the Empress’ trusted servant, chooses to reveal that true history so it would be preserved in the archives of the Singing Hills Abbey.
The book was lightning in a bottle — instantly memorable, beautifully written, and welcoming to rereads periodically. The subsequent books have not quite captured that frisson, and I’m not sure why. But they’re all still excellent reads. And although I can be petty and small, I also know how to rid myself of those feelings, so after I threw The Chosen and the Beautiful into my pile of books to give away, I took up A Mouthful of Dust, and it was a great choice to blow out the negativity.
Looking back over the (so far) half-dozen novellas, which can be read in any order, by the way, I’ve come away thinking A Mouthful of Dust almost hits the standard set by The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The inaugural book’s strength came from its newness, the tight plotline, the inexorable and seemingly random gradual reveal of In-yo’s plans for conquest.
A Mouthful of Dust succeeds because of the consummate craftsmanship of the narrative. Not a single line is misplaced; no detail detracts. And the story itself is terrifying and terrible. Cleric Chih and Almost Brilliant travel to Baolin, at once the center for a famous pork dish, and also famed for having survived a devastating famine. Li Shui, who knows how to prepare Baolin pork, tells Chih his story of the famine’s coming, learned from his mother. And the famine is a spirit, a dragon, the Great Houshoun that cannot be sated. Behind the stories that Chih collects is the truth that emerges slowly and unwillingly, that when people have eaten everything, they will eventually eat each other. It takes terrible sacrifice to satisfy the Houshoun, and not every sacrifice can be acknowledged, at least not until Chih arrives in Baolin and unknowingly changes the equation.
Despite the terrible costs of the famine and the deaths and all the suffering, life goes on. The people survive; they recover. Li Shui has a small cousin who will grow up to help him make the famous Baolin pork, its recipe guarded and kept, even from the Singing Hills Abbey. I don’t want to reveal any more of the plot, which centers on Magistrate Liu and what he is willing to do to get through the starving time, but rest assured it’s worth your time to read. For all the horrors of the famine, all the loss and the cruelty, there are also green shoots at the end, and innocent children, and tiny white kittens.
Mostly, the book is about food — how we savor it, what we miss when we don’t get it, what we’re willing to do without in penance for horrific sins.
Through the telling of her story, Madame Liu’s voice had not wavered. She had barely blinked. Chih noted that as well, and their hand paused over the paper. They hesitated. Madame Liu took pity on them.
“You want to ask me how she tasted.”
Chih actually knew. The archives at Singing Hills held thousands of famines, wars, tyrants, and outdated medical beliefs. it was something of a rite of passage for the teenage novices to venture into the archives as night and find the worst of the worst, the tortures and atrocities and horrors that in the end were so depressingly common. Everything and nothing was a surprise for a historian, and Chih knew that starving people had compared the taste of human flesh variously to pork, to chicken, to veal, and to young fawn.
“I want to know how she tasted to you,” they said carefully.
— page 50
I should add there’s not a scintilla of torture porn or glorification of violence in the book. Tough subject, but not sensationalized.
After finishing this novella, I sat for a while in admiration about the honesty and delicacy of a brutal plot, and then my admiration turned to wonder as I read it again. There is not an element, not a word, wasted in this tale. I think you, too, will be stunned.
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