A review by korrick
Death Of A Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong

3.0

It was not people that make interpretations, but interpretations that make people.

While I'm doing my best to expand my reading on a demographical level, I'm fairly predictable when it comes to my enjoyment of various genres. I'll pick up a mystery novel every so often under special circumstances ([b:Murder on the Orient Express|853510|Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)|Agatha Christie|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1486131451s/853510.jpg|2285570] for the sake of a movie and a famous woman writer, for example), but I can't recall ever enjoying them for the sake of the mystery. I liked both of the Natsuo Kirino crime novels that I've read, but that was because of her brutally incisive take on gender politics, not because I cared very much about solutions or the chase. I was drawn to DoaRH by promises of a tale other than the same old Euro, written by someone who was a participant in, not a fetishizer of, the culture, but there's more than one way to skin a cat, and I found that the welcome addition of poetry and meditations on Chinese history, both ancient and recent, couldn't totally make up for an overtly voyeuristic style when it came to the women in the novel. The mystery's resolution as admirable in its coldly pragmatic logic, but it doesn't do much good to choose one's material in order to ward off stereotypes, only to land in a fire of others.

This work both is and isn't a quick read. On the one hand, the writing is rather simplistic, the plot is straightforward for all its background machinations, and there is very little innuendo that isn't immediately contextualized. On the other hand, it became rather dreary to follow the narrative's obsessions with sexualizing and/or pigeonholing women, from the beginning eroticizing a dead female body, to the middle lone female POV being little more than a mirror of the surrounding male characters with a touch of whimsy despite the character development of a capable mother and industrious worker, to the end of a long lost love, a perfect mother, and a romantically overthrown political model appearing in rapid succession, a combination of three people that didn't have half of the complexity of the male sidekick. It took the edge off the commentary on the often harrowing history of early 1990s China, and when comparing this work to [b:Beijing Coma|2100810|Beijing Coma|Ma Jian|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440047798s/2100810.jpg|3453425] as I did whenever the narrative brought Tienanmen Square up, I was left with the usual emptiness that comes from witnessing so much being told in conjunction with ignoring or petrifying half the impacted population. The gratuitousness of the last few chapters didn't help either, and I was left with a mystery novel that, despite its largely respectful yet pragmatic treatment of an often Euro-demonized world, often fell prey to the same sensationalizing stereotypes that plagues noir works which deal with whiter countries. Much as I wouldn't mind learning more about the history of China, literary and otherwise, I can do that in a much more effective manner with other works, and can even wholly focus on women to boot: two birds with one stone.

This mystery novel certainly had a lot more original context and a higher standard of quality than the average classic. However, it's hard to meditate in reflective complacency over snapshot views of late 20th century China and its backdrop of history if half the characters are used and abused so cavalierly and then superficially sympathized with at the end, as if all the objectification that happened previously could be blown away with a few short pats on the head. That, and deus ex machina on part of several, again female, characters made the last few sections absurd, seeing as how they somehow telepathically went completely out of their way in order to make the male main character happy. All in all, a decent learning experience, if less than entertaining, but there are disfavorable reasons for why I sped through it as I did.

Justice was like colored balls in a magician's hand, changing color and shape all the time, beneath the light of politics.