Where Guo Jing Learns to Fight

A Hero Born by Jin Yong
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a Chinese novel (the first part of a long series) translated to English, and it's a wuxia fantasy, with a historical setting and kind of magical kung fu that you find in Crouching Tiger and books and movies of that sort. I liked it some, but less than I hoped. Many of the pages of this book are fun to read, but the overall plot and story is disappointing. It's a pretty fast read and I enjoyed it at times, but it took me ages to finish because there were many days where I didn't have any interest in picking it up. That's why I gave it 3 stars; the whole series might be a 4 or 5 star read for some readers, but I didn't find it rewarding enough to go any farther.

Some of the adventure stuff, including the fighting, is very entertaining. As stand-alone scenes, they do well. But my main regret is that they don't add up to too much. There isn't a true main conflict controlling the narrative, connecting events from the beginning to end, and I missed that. What he have instead is this conflict: two orphans are being raised from birth by opponents (a single Taoist on one side and a small group of fighters on the other) to see who can beat the other when they're teens. We follow the Seven Heroes of the South who are raising Guo Jing. The need to hide out and train for years drives everything. Other conflicts crop up, such as angry rivals and powerful enemies, but they are mostly resolved quickly and left behind. Because of the episodic nature of these smaller conflicts, it reads like a biography, bouncing around without clear direction.

Guo Jing learns some kung fu; he wins a fight. He learns a new technique; another fight. Sometimes, other people fight.

Maybe in the second or third book we'll see a different main conflict evolve, possibly dealing with the wars between the Song Chinese and the Jin Empire, or between the Jin and the Mongols. I don't know. That's the background of the story, and everything is possible. There are a few adventure and romance tropes, with real fathers being found and hidden identities revealed, and that's fun, but from the perspective of the protagonist, it's all just random information he runs into rather than a problem solved through any kind of effort. Most of the action is just one justification after another for characters to fight, either at a bar or out in the wilderness or on the city streets, and the conflicts prompting the action are generally resolved within a short time.

I don't mean to argue the book is doing it wrong. It's reasonable to recognize that this was written for a Chinese audience, and the storytelling format is different for that reason. I get that. (In that context, btw, this book is a smash hit.) For Western readers, though, there are unmet expectations which make it harder to enter into the story. It's more like The Scholars or Water Margin, a couple classic Chinese novels, where the narrative follows one character who has some problem, and then he interacts with somebody else and the narration follows that character with his problems, changing many times over the course of the story, with many small intervening conflicts along the way. (Old characters meet back up, and you better remember who they were!) But there's no single main arc told from the perspective of a main character, and if you go looking for that you're gonna get lost. It's a different way to tell a story, a different norm, not a mistake. Having said that--and asserting that I'm always speaking only for myself in my reviews, not remotely attempting to assign anything like absolute value--it isn't my jam. It doesn't work as well for me. Everyone else is welcome to embrace the style.

I'm rooting for more Chinese fantasy to make it to English, as well as more Asia-influenced fantasy written intentionally for a western audience. For some readers, this series will work. For me, it was a smaller success than I hoped for.

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