Review - Butterfly: A Novel by Julie O'Yang
Chinese
mythology is filled with tales of fish-women, erotic enchantresses who can
disguise their scales, perhaps for generations, in order to lure the human men
they love. These archetypal creatures have been re-imagined by Dutch-Chinese
author Julie O’Yang in her fascinating new book Butterfly: A Novel, and they exist in a world that incorporates the
modernity of Shanghai with memories of the Nanking massacre and the romantic
and sexual torments of a young doctor.
O’Yang has created an intriguing and
quite complex world in this novel, and it makes a fascinating read for anyone
interested in China and Chinese culture and history.
Butterfly: A Novel is also about women and the problematic tropes
of femininity at work in Chinese culture. A repeated motif in the book is the
presence of the Buddhist Goddess Guanyin, a feminine figure of the divine who
is of enormous importance in the popular religious imagination, and oddly
powerful in a religion and culture more noted for favouring masculine power.
But O’Yang’s Goddess of Mercy is not the delicate beauty of Chinese
iconography. She is cruel and occasionally whimsical, creating torments along
with mercies. I must say I admired O’Yang’s bravery in tackling this particular
archetype of feminine perfection. Because of course it is doctrinally correct –
along with her merciful forms, Avalokitesvara is a wrathful creature whose
charge is also to protect and defend the dharma.
“They say the butterfly fish was made by Bodhisattva Guanyin after she had had a strange dream.”
The Goddess
toys with creation in her dreams, and much of this novel inhabits the same,
dream-like, fantastical world in which fish-women exist alongside (though
hidden away from) modernity. The sexy and sassy young nurses dress
provocatively and go to all-night dance parties in sophisticated modern
Shanghai, while moldering away in an attic lies a pathetically beautiful
creature that longs for her old states of being and lives in a state of
perpetual, but beautiful, regret.
The
mythology of the fish-person has resonances across cultures, and it is
frequently associated with a kind of female perfection and beauty which is
irresistible to man. I was reading Butterfly: A Novel while travelling through
Cambodia and Thailand, where in daily life I frequently heard similar legends
and even saw them represented. O’Yang’s act of creation is, self-consciously or
not, a step along in this older tradition of story-building, and the novel is
rendered all the more complex and fascinating because of this.
It is a novel
of grief and of desire, and at one point O’Yang writes, quite starkly: “desire
is so strong you can’t afford the consequences.” But of course, it is the
consequences of desire (which inevitably include death and destruction) that go
to make up the events of this novel.
More particularly, it is desire mis-applied, or perversely directed
towards that which might cause most chaos. It is dangerous and queer desire,
the love of the wrong, and the forbidden connection between creatures that
should never have met – in O’Yang’s book a fish-woman and a Japanese soldier. All
of this, mind, taking place in the fraught background of World War Two Nanking,
a place that has provided some rich literary pickings for Chinese writers, from
Ye Zhaoyan to May-lee Chai.
Julie
O’Yang has created a glittering magic-realist novel that explores desire and
the cruel capriciousness of sexual attraction. It is a brave and sometimes
challenging novel, and one that will enchant anyone interested in love,
relationship and the eternal echoes of Chinese culture and mythology.
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