A strange, sun-faded yarn inhabited by lonely women and selfish men (including one who becomes the other), Whale carries us to the remote Korean village of Pyongdae, a backwater swamp that leaps mightily into 20th-century modernity before one day finding itself beached upon the white daisy fleabane flowers that blanket its abandoned brickyard.
With a magical realism reminiscent of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Cheon Myeong-kwan tells the story of family across generations, backgrounded by a world both bizarre and mundane. In the first act, we briefly meet a daughter: simple, strong, mute Chunhui. A former prisoner accused of arson, her “naked body the size of a water buffalo” returns, heartbreakingly, to empty Pyongdae, the only place she can think to go. Nobody is left from the old days, just remnants of the burned-down town, including fragments of the huge whale-inspired movie theater imagined and constructed by her mother, Geumbok.
Cheon’s world is governed by folktale physics that emerge in a series of “laws” —the law of the world, of rumors, of genetics, of love, and a few dozen more. The “law” device, which recurs throughout the book, binds together various times and places within the story and lends a mythical quality to the harsh lives of Whale’s characters.
After Chunhui, we separately meet a crone, unspeakably ugly, whose illicit union with her employer’s half-wit son results in a daughter, a firing, and a murder. The old crone gives away her daughter, whose eye is burnt out with a hot poker after a betrayal, to a beekeeper in the mountains.
Our omniscient narrator isn’t exactly clear on some of the details, creating the feeling of an oral retelling that might change from one occasion to the other. The narrator is also fond of gratuitous sexual imagery, infusing the story with lowbrow interest, as if one of the neighboring townspeople, and not an “author,” is recounting this tale to us. The story repeatedly steers us towards mythical tropes, even introducing a character named Trickster. At the same time, the narrator consistently subverts our expectations by deploying sharp tonal shifts to remind us that we’re in the 20th century.
Cheon increases the story’s folkloric feeling with multiple interpretations of a strange event. For example, when the beekeeper dies, and his buzzing creatures blanket him: “Later, people would say the bees were blowing warmth into his body, or that it was their way of expressing sorrow. Some even said it was actually the bees that had killed the beekeeper.”
We flit back and forth through time as the crone’s daughter returns, flanked by a swarm of bees, searching and failing to find a fortune her miserly mother has amassed, yet, on her deathbed, refuses to share. The return of a spurned daughter to her original home, unable to find satisfactory answers, reflects Chunhui’s return to the abandoned brickyard of Pyongdae.
The bulk of our time in Whale is primarily spent with one character, Chunhui’s mother Geumbok. A girl who leaves behind a small village and lecherous father for the arms of a pungent fishmonger, Geumbok arrives in the big city, awakened to the vast possibility of the ocean. Geumbok soon leaves the fishmonger (who ignores a mysterious prophecy to his own downfall) for the unbelievably large Geokjeong. But just as soon, she is seduced by a sinister pimp with missing fingers, who grants her unlimited access to a new, and magical place: a movie theater. Like the crone, who attacks her own daughter when a bad memory is brought up, Geumbok births a daughter to whom she cannot bear to grow close.
The one real bright spot in Chunhui’s story is her friendship with the elephant Jumbo, who is owned by two bar-running twins, formerly of the circus. Jumbo in his wise innocence (like Geokjeong, or like Geumbok when she first encounters a whale leaping out of the sea) provides a lone friend and surrogate mother for Chunhui. We are never quite clear whether their conversations are “really” happening, or are purely imagined by Chunhui.
The second act takes us to early Pyongdae, where Geumbok opens a cafe and where money falls upon her from the sky. Instead of relaxing and enjoying life as a rich woman, Geumbok and her current partner decide to build a brickyard on swampy land, which nearly bankrupts her. But the brickyard is a success—so much so that when it is taken hostage by the crone’s daughter and her controlled swarm of bees, Geumbok manages to outsmart them. Geumbok’s constant change and ambition is borne out in the advancing modernity she brings to remote Pyongdae, including her movie theater (a stylized, childlike drawing of a whale she presents to the architect is embedded in the book’s pages; the only other drawing in the book is the image of a daisy fleabane flower that the simple Chunhui naively uses in place of a signature). The old crone reappears in the form of a curse, echoing the way in which a mother’s difficult upbringing cascades to future generations, and dogging Geumbok and her plans.
Whale is occasionally an incongruous read, because the excitable oral storytelling style is sometimes at odds with the often-slow pace of the novel. On the other hand, moments of digression lulled me into a dreamlike state, where individual events matter less than the overarching patterns that seem to ripple through the mother-daughter pairs of Geumbok and Chunhui, the old crone and her one-eyed, bee-wielding daughter.
At times the characters ring hollow. The twins, for example, lack depth, and felt as though they had been written simply to fill the role of (some of the book’s very few) sympathetic supporting characters. Likewise, I wish the crone’s one-eyed daughter had been more deeply fleshed out. There should be tons to write about a woman who commands an army of bees with a whistle, but she receives little page time and is reduced to a hermit. In contrast, I felt Geumbok had experienced too many ups and downs, to the point that I lost interest in what happened to her next. She began to feel like a placeholder character rather than someone with a meaningful arc. The action that occurred around her, towards the end, often felt unrelated or even contradictory to her character’s arc.
The book’s tragic third act, marked by Chunhui’s brutal experiences in prison and the abuse she suffers at the hands of the evil guard Ladybug, also gives us hope for this gentle soul when she returns to the brickyard to unearth nostalgic slivers from her challenging past. A boy she once knew returns as an adult, but like virtually every other man in the book he withholds some vital aspect of himself, acting poorly as a partner and father. The story’s lonely (yet hopeful?) ending, followed by nature’s reclamation over humanity, made me think of a line early in the novel, delivered by one of Chunhui’s cellmates:
Until the day she was executed, she was the one who swept and cleaned their cell. What’s the point of cleaning when your days are numbered? She would say, Life is sweeping away the dust that keeps piling up, as she mopped the floor with a rag, and sometimes she would add, Death is nothing more than dust piling up.
Chunhui continues making perfect bricks alone in the brickyard, sweeping away the dust that threatens to settle over her life like the daisy fleabane flowers that settle over the deserted brickyard.
“For [Chunhui], bricks were a beacon to those who had left and a spell cast in an effort to bring back the past.”
Despite my critiques, I found the book’s ending emotional. In the slow way that dust gathers on a surface over time without one noticing, Whale’s story and characters began to settle over me. In the nineteen years between the publication of Whale and its translation into English, the speed of the world has only accelerated. Whale contrasts Geumbok, who rushes into modernity, with her daughter Chunhui, whose giant-like form and simple priorities seem to stand against it. As a reader, I found it compelling that the child of modernity might be something ancient and timeless and strange. If this idea interests you, I recommend reading Whale.
Chris Stavitsky is a writer in Northern California.