On Such a Full Sea

I've never read anything by Chang-Rae Lee before, but this book was highly-rated and looked interesting, so I got the ebook from the library. After having read the book, I'm honestly still not quite sure what I think about it.

The novel is set in a distant future where everyone either lives in "facilities," "charters," or "open counties." The facilities are specialized highly-regimented (but not horrible) working towns that provide high-end goods for the lucky wealthy who live in the charters. The open counties are wild areas where the government has pretty much given up and you pretty much take your life in your hands. The story focuses on Fan, a young woman who raises fish in the B-Mor facility, which was once Baltimore, and her boyfriend Reg, who raises plants there. When Reg suddenly disappears, Fan leaves the safety of B-Mor to take her chances in the counties, hoping to find him.

Lee does a wonderfully detailed job creating his future world, and he uses an odd technique of having the story told by a nameless, faceless, but still interested third party, almost like a descendant of Fan's passing on a piece of family lore to the next generation (which makes for an interesting experience for the reader, because the narrator tells a lot of things that he doesn't actually witness). But the characters were disappointingly one-dimensional to me, and I never really felt a connection with Fan (and Reg was totally flat).

I have a sense that there is something larger here, that I need to think more about the story before forming my final opinion. There are a lot of layers, and different ways of reading things. This was definitely one of the most intriguing novels I've read in a while, and that's certainly worth something.


On Such a Full Sea