In Bora Chung’s new novel Red Sword, Chrisna, a slave/ warrior of the colonising “Imperials”, is forced to fight, for unclear reasons, a monstrous enemy referred to as the “white aliens”. The novel is a rinse-repeat sequence of imperial oppression; sword-versus-laser fights; escape-and-capture from either aliens or Imperials; clones dealing with Xeroxed memories; and a few matter-of-fact sex scenes.

The book’s blurb makes no mention of any of the above features, but it does helpfully note that the story “draws upon” the Korean history of the Qing Empire forcing Koreans to battle Russia. I would have inferred no such allegorical connection from the novel itself. This is probably indicative of my limitations, not the novel’s. What I know of Korea mostly comprises stuff I’ve watched on TV (dreamy androgynous romances, zombie outbreaks in medieval Korean kingdoms, a colonial legacy, and exactly one K-Pop song — Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’).

The novel’s repetitive, monotonous narration makes it a hard read. It was Vonnegut who said, I think, that reading some novels can feel like being married to a perpetually ill spouse. I didn’t enter into that sort of intimacy with Chung’s novel, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur. But I hovered on the threshold, admiring the patient’s intractability, and stoically awaiting the arrival of the last chapter.

Trauma of war

There are two kinds of unreadability when it comes to novels. The first variety is the product of an author’s incompetence and the other stems from their originality. Now, any single novel can’t prove an author is incompetent. But a body of work is more revealing. Originality is a persistent ailment; incompetence is not. Authors generally improve with practice; the truly original have no such hero’s journey.

In Chung’s case, I believe it is her originality, not incompetence, which characterises her peculiar stories. She’s got a style that doesn’t care about characterisation, plot realism, place specificity or emotional warmth of any kind. Her paper people go through traumatic events, they suffer, they have sex, they die; sometimes in non-causal order. She tells us they feel this emotion or that, but it all feels unreal. Her characters are presented as human, but there is a singular lack of depth to their actions and experiences which leaves one uncertain they are human.

For example, we are told a man is badly wounded in battle — “from his hip to his armpit, there was a black line where a ray had grazed him” — and that he “grimaced and gritted his teeth”. Then having dispensed with this behavioural routine, he proceeds with the adventure. At another point, Chrisna and her fellow prisoners are taken back to their cells after a particularly brutal battle. The author tells us: “The prisoners were given a rare, delicious feast that night. But very few of them ate without guilt or dread. Most of them were thinking of their fallen friends. As well as the Imperials who had forbidden them from using guns and shot them instead.”

The flatness of the descriptions, their summarised quality and the lack of variety in the class of people being described isn’t an isolated case though. If the aim is to represent the trauma of fighting the wars of one’s colonial rulers, then this style is certainly one way to go about it. Especially since these people are copies of copies of copies of people who possibly did feel and act like actual humans might. Chung rather grudgingly gives them labels, but even these are often just colour labels: “white alien”, “Light Green Skirt”, “Indigo Skirt”.

Writing paper people

The many tiresome fight sequences remind me of Japanese Isekai gamebooks. These books, as numerous as beetles, often have characters with anime-style features, fixed personality traits and stylised gestures engaging in pages and pages of combat. In comparison, Chung’s action sequences are models of Beckettian restraint.

In any case, I don’t think the style is specific to this work. It seems to be how Chung prefers to write her characters. Her earlier work, the International Booker Prize-shortlisted Cursed Bunny which brought her to international attention, is also filled with people strolling around the uncanny valley. There, in the story ‘Goodbye, My Love’, she has her narrator remark: “I wonder whether the concept of the ‘uncanny valley’ can be applied to behaviour as much as it does to appearance.” It is an original and interesting question and perhaps Red Sword seeks to answer this question in the affirmative.

I have insinuated this is a difficult novel. That needn’t be a strike against the book. Many works we now consider great are difficult, even unreadable — think Joyce’s Finnegans’ Wake. What matters is that this is also an interesting book — for its style and obduracy. Over the years, Chung has garnered a devoted following for her highly imaginative, genre-blending fiction. This novel, which, like the rest of Chung’s oeuvre, demands an atypical level of attentiveness, should surely please her readers. 

The reviewer is an author, most recently of The Coincidence Plot.

Red Sword

Bora Chung, trs Anton Hur

Pan Macmillan

₹399