On Such a Full Sea

By: Chang-rae Lee

Narrated by: B. D. Wong

Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's Summary

From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a shocking, future America.

On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way listeners think about the world they live in.

In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class - descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China - find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.

In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.

©2013 Chang-rae Lee (P)2013 Penguin Audio

Literary dystopian fiction

Chang-Rae Lee's dystopian story of an America in decline, occupied generations ago by "New Chinese" who have displaced the Anglo and African-American residents of the major cities and pushed them out into the surrounding, anarchic "Counties," reads like one of those dystopian novels written by a literary author who's decided to try his hand at dystopian novels. I could compare On Such a Full Sea with Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, or Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. All of these books are similar - they depict a world in which economic and environmental collapse has brought down the old governments, and new peoples, new orders, have filled in the gaps. The haves and have-nots are more sharply divided. Outside the enclaves of the privileged is lawlessness and a grinding fight for survival.

On Such a Full Sea is well-written literary fiction that covers all of this ground in an engaging story, but it never convinced me that Chang-Rae Lee is more than a visitor to the genre. There isn't a lot of imagination in his post-collapse story, no technological speculation, very little in the way of reimagined futuristic society, just some issues of identity and class and racial divides that still exist even in a reconfigured landscape, and a heroine who is an impressive, admirable, yet very ordinary young girl who sets off into the Counties looking for her boyfriend, who has disappeared.

Fan, the main character, is a diver for fish in B-Mor (formerly Baltimore). The story is ostensibly told after the fact of the events described, in which Fan has become a kind of legend, an inspiration for the people of B-Mor. The B-Morans, descendants of Chinese workers who came to the East Coast after an undescribed collapse of the United States, are the "working class" of this future. The "Charters" are the privileged wealthy who still live the equivalent of middle class to affluent lifestyles, though as the book progresses and Fan and meets several groups of people from various walks of life, it becomes apparent that even for the Charters, the economy is such that a fall from grace, consignment to the laboring class or even banishment to the Counties, is always a worrisome possibility.

Fan's adventures take her through some harrowing (but much less harrowing than some dystopian writers would depict) adventures in those Counties, which really aren't Mad Max wastelands but more like a Wild West in which some towns have well-regulated law and order, others are ruled by despots, and others have no law at all. Then she goes through a series of stays with Charter families, some of them kindly, some of them creepy, all of them a bit blinkered by the privilege of their own existence.

Then there is an ending, which was, I suppose, a literary ending.

It's a good book in the sense that it was well-constructed, with a lot of prose that waxes more elegiac than usual for sci-fi, and Fan is a likeable, sturdy, determined girl.

Still, I have a bit of a bias against authors who give the impression they are slumming with sci-fi. Cormac McCarthy did it with The Road. Kazuo Ishiguro did it a little with his book, whose science fictional premise was thin and nigh-on unbelievable. Margaret Atwood actually writes SF even if she's taken some flack for eschewing the label. David Mitchell is a literary author who embraces the genre.

Chang-Rae Lee seemed to be telling another story, with dystopian fiction as his medium. It's a good story, but it did not really embrace the elements of the genre, and so to me it lacked the imagination to be truly brilliant. It's a good book for those who like some literary-flavored speculative fiction, but it is not likely to impress veterans of the genre.

6 of 6 people found this review helpful

I really wanted to like it

I wish I could have given this novel a better review, but for me, it didn't live up to it's promise. I found it wordy to the point of tedium and then the ending didn't really pay off- It felt tacked on.

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

Inventive, Engaging, & Surprising

Lee has created a new world where charter villages, facilities, and counties people try to cope with a post apocalyptic world that has forced them to adapt and to find meaning. Each of these different groups must also struggle to survive (easily if you are a charter person, with a lot of hard work if you live in a facility, and with great difficulty if you live in the counties).

Lee's story follows the life of Fan, a young woman who lives in a facility, BMore (formerly Baltimore). Due to events that are never totally clear, she leaves home and travels through the counties and eventually a charter village. Very engaging and repeatedly surprising - right up to the end- Fan - and the reader - are confronted by the struggle to survive, life and death decisions of who to trust, and the existential need to define a sense of purpose and meaning in life.

I highly recommend this very original work. I was never bored and I always looked forward to listening. Although it is never clear who the narrator is and there is very little first person dialog, I hope Lee will follow up with more work that explores what it means to be fully human while facing an uncertain future.

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

Overrated!

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Chang-rae Lee's "On Such a Full Sea" (Sea) received very strong reviews from the New York Times and The Guardian. I was less than impressed. Sea has an imaginative premise, but lacks a solid story to maintain the reader's engagement. Throughout Sea the reader never feels a sense of conclusion as so many questions and issues are unresolved. At points Sea seems like a series of unconnected short stories with only a single familiar character. References to dystopia science fiction theme are overblown (one reviewer comparing Sea to Brave New World). Chang-rae Lee leaves you in dark relative to the development or history of the dystopia society.

I will pay Chang-rae Lee his due respect as a writing of prose. He is the master of describing what others are feeling, observing, or experiencing. Ultimately, despite the technical perfection of the writing the reader just doesn't care about the characters.

I have read 56 books in the last two years, where Sea ranks in 44th position (21%).

7 of 8 people found this review helpful

An Engaging Dystopia Just Around the Bend

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes. It works on many levels so you can approach it from different angles.

What did you like best about this story?

The way the story moved back and forth between Fan's uncomfortable, often frightening experiences and the mythologizing of those experiences by the residents of B-More.

What about B. D. Wong’s performance did you like?

He was not awkward with characters who were children or female. He moved seamlessly between the characters, and kept the story flowing even as the mood changed.

If you could take any character from On Such a Full Sea out to dinner, who would it be and why?

Reg! To finally meet him!

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Beautiful Storytelling

This is an amazing story that is completely unpredictable. It is well written and engaging. You will NOT regret knowing this story.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Uniquely Compelling Tale

The writing was exquisite, the story both riveting and provocative and I already searched for my next book by narrator. He's soothing and poetic and brings the words to life with evocative prowess.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

feels like part one of a serial

What did you like best about On Such a Full Sea? What did you like least?

It is an engaging story, but too much of the storyline is unexplained. I would read part 2 (assuming this is going to turn into a serial) just to see what happens next...

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I thought all of it was very interesting.

Have you listened to any of B. D. Wong’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

This was the first time I listened to Wong narrate. I thought he did a wonderful job!

Could you see On Such a Full Sea being made into a movie or a TV series? Who should the stars be?

no

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Very different

Being my first audio book, it was really easy to listen to. B.D. Wong did great and the story, though odd, was very entertaining.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Waste of emotional energy

B.D. Wong, you did a great job narrating this awful book. It's boring and has no happy endings. Plus, this book only drags. -.- I never hated a book as much as this one.

2 of 3 people found this review helpful