What it's all about

A friend recently posted this NPR book review about Ray Bradbury. The premise of the review is the reviewer's issue with the recent spate of dystopias. He argues in favor of Ray Bradbury as different from these other dystopia authors because of his capacity for feeling both hope and despair about the future.

We're going to leave Bradbury for a little bit to discuss the dystopia I'm currently reading.

The basic premise of On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee is that the main character, a young girl named Fan, has left the confines of B-Mor, a self-contained settlement which supplies a Charter village (the elite of this society) with their produce and fish. She leaves (and leaving is a rather unusual act, as the "countries" are not viewed as very safe or desirable by the standards of the residents of B-Mor) to find her boyfriend Reg. Reg is apparently C-free, C standing for "the Crash, a degenerative condition in which the major organs begin to fail, one after another..." (75). However, the narrator ("we") states that "Nobody goes C-free--nobody--an axiom that we B-mors and counties people have surely accepted but that Charters probably never will, given the obscuring veil their essentially inexhaustible resources can throw over reality" (117).

It is this anomalous aspect of Reg that seems to have led to his disappearance, the narrator speculating that the Charters have taken him for testing to discover what is so unique about him that he can avoid "C."  It is this hope that he offers an answer that leads to his disappearance and it is Fan's hope that leads to her departure and, in so doing, causes her to become the beacon of hope for those in B-Mor.  Hope seems to be the major theme of the first parts of this book, followed closely by its corollary, despair. 

Which brings me back to the review of Bradbury. In the review, the author writes that Bradbury "...sings about the possibility and the promise of the future because, to him, it was all right there. Because tomorrow was the future and the future was inarguably awesome." This is the same function that Fan serves for the residents of B-Mor. They live in a world with little mobility, little chance of change in their lives, and Fan serves as a sign that the "world can sometimes split open, in just the way we hope. That it and we are, in fact, unbounded. Free" (7).  For people with little power over their own lives, Fan's action propel, for some reason, a rash of strange behaviors, behaviors that allow people to assert their own freedom to choose. The narrative, in fact, shifts between chapters that trace Fan's journey and chapters that narrate the changes that occur in B-Mor after Fan's departure.

This shifting narrative helps to frame, and delay, our understanding of Fan's actions, as we get them filtered through the group narrator's perspective and, in many ways, that narrator is trying to make sense of things as well.  For example, the narrator wonders whether Fan intends any of this reaction to her search for Reg or whether, as the narrator reveals at the end of a chapter, she is just looking for the father of her unborn child.

Such a quest is rather a ridiculous one given that Fan has no clue where Reg is or how to find him. Nor does she really have any resources at her disposal, except for her hope and her persistence:

Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the
void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly
stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears. Fan was different...she was not one to bold herself back. Or to be fettered. ...She was someone who pursued her
project...following with focus and intensity as well as an enduring innocence a goal she
 could not quite yet understand or see but wholly believed. (182)

So far, Fan has survived multiple setbacks, including being hit by a car and being kidnapped by a circus family who intends to feed her traveling companion to their dogs and force Fan to be part of their troupe.  Currently, after narrowly avoiding a sexual assault, Fan has been made the "property" of a strange woman who has "kept" seven other girls locked in a room for years. These are some really strange plot details, which suggest that the future is indeed a bleak place. However, "within [Fan] was the promise that could deliver us, the seed of all our futures, Charters' and B-Mors' and even of the shunned souls out in the counties..." (121).