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A review by korrick
Three Kingdoms: Classic Novel in Four Volumes by Luo Guanzhong
4.0
Volume Four, Finale
At the beginning of this volume, pretty much every character that the narrative had chosen to significantly invest development in back in the first volume was dead. Kongming/Zhuge Liang, my favorite, not introduced until the second volume, was still kicking, but he would be in his coffin ten chapters. Still, he was destined to terrorize his enemies through trickery and more supernatural means up until the point that the author made the spirit transcend its human loyalties and advocate for imperial unity no matter what. I latched onto a few other full names and general surnames in order keep afloat, and slowly but surely Cao shifted to Sima and both Bei and Sun fell into the same calumny that that work presented as the primary destabilization of the Han emperor around two thousand pages to go. Honestly, the most notable thing to me was how much Kongming fell apart when it came to martial prowess, but considering what the afterword had to say about how many popular accounts of that man's life inflated his strategy skills, I suppose both the author and the editor of this particular edition (the one who holistically re-calibrated with utter abandon the more factually straightforward tale into their preferred piece of moralizing, if appreciative, literature) had to tone it down a bit, else the historically accurate collapse of all of Kongming's ambitions couldn't have conceivably happened, could it have. Other than that, Jiang Wei, a defecting minor general who became supremely major once all the big names were gone, carried me through until almost the very tail end of two empires finally surrendering to the third, and then, in some ways in an extremely deflated fashion, the civil war was over and the empire was whole. Descendants not living up to the image of their ancestors and all that.
By the end, I was completely caught up in the sociopolitical commentary that could be easily applied to contemporary times. For example, people rightfully make a big deal of of Confucius' onerous hierarchical absolutism, but part of that long ago and wildly influential thinker's doctrine is the fact that "the responsibility for disorder rests on those above," and these days, my own government has nearly 700,000 plague infections and 37,000 plague deaths on their plate as the result of obtuse mismanagement, opportunistic bigotry, and pure greed. That utmost need for leadership to be both morally and capably fit of ruling ('virtue' and 'talent' are the exact words used) beyond all restraints of blood kinship is the other side of the conflict between inheritance and merit, and so much of this book in its contents, construction, and legacy is tied up in how much fate favors one or the other and how hard humans try to adapt their story as a metaphor for their own success, failures, and chance for revenge/redemption. I mentioned LotR earlier, and near the very tail end of finishing this, I became rather caught up in the idea that Tolkien had to have read this work, or heard of it, or something, because the parallels just get ridiculous after a while (it'll be fun rereading [b:The Silmarilion] after this). The first attempt at Anglo translation of this work was back in 1925, so it's not a wildly outrageous theory, and the whole 'oh some things are just universal' has become an increasingly unacceptable argument in my mind. In other words, yet another angle for my furious brain to embark upon when it comes to constructing a reason for why I tackled 2300+ pages of a work I have little to no academic training for intuitive context and absolutely no fluency for direct understanding. Honestly, though, like some if you ask them why they want(ed) to climb Mt. Everest, I read it cause it was there, and unlike that more (in)famous activity, I didn't risk leaving my rotting corpse or guarantee my leaving a bunch of trash that'll slowly slip down as the thermometer goes up and be yet another instance of postcolonial blight for humanity to disproportionately contend with. Will they be reading this work 3600 years after the portrayed events, much as I do 1800 years after? I hope so.
I'm finished with this, and yet I want to read more. There are commentaries on Zhuge Liang in all forms and flavors, histories of the interaction of 'Three Kingdoms' with the various dynasties, debates over the veracity of various historical personas, analyses of the amazingly fervent and ginormous Lord Guan/Guan Yu cult(s) (did I mention that a reference to him showed up in a Greek mythology fighter video game that's currently being developed?), and histories upon histories upon histories, from Chinggis/Genghis Khan to how the Mandate of Heaven was translated into government policy upon the official end of the dynastic train. I also don't want to deal with any of that until next year at the very earliest, because much as this ended well, I am utterly sick of having a quarter of my reading capacity blocked off for months months upon months. I suppose I should make some recommendation regarding how readers interested in this should best prepare for, but honestly, if you're not the type to have wandered into the list of Longest Novels of All Time a while ago and thought that that would make for a good bucket list if modulated accordingly, your best bet is cutting your teeth on some of the more modest 1000+ page works. My inspiration was likely first spawned by the tales my friends told of the omnipresent and omnitedious Chinese school that they attended on the weekends, wherein they were made to memorize entire lists of dynasties and associated material. I got some of that during the afterword, and I gotta say: some of it's kinda cool.
Volume Three
This volume marks my necessary shift in perspective from a 'Lord of the Rings' style narrative to a succession of dynasties à la Game of Thrones, albeit with every main character from the first volume being struck down rather than each embarking on their own disparate survival-of-the-fittest quest far across land and sea. Both of the figureheads of the film Red Cliff are dead, and I have stopped regretting the fact that my favorite, Zhuge Liang/Kongming, took a volume and a half to show up, as he is practically all that is left of the initial bond made long ago in a far off peach garden. Now, he is surrounded by the descendants of the warlords who first drew him in and against whom he has pitted all his skill, cunning, and integrity, affording me a window into how generational blood feuds are born and children live out the dynastic usurpation of their forefathers. True, the battles of the children and grandchildren, some from thrones, some in the field, some with their own kin, allow me to reminisce on the beginnings of this epic tale, and how little the course of this volume resembles the fallout I had imagined way back at the start. This section had its unique moments, especially during the course of Kongming's southern campaign against the Man people (imagine the area just north of Vietnam, or "The Deep", as this work refers to it), wherein the self-accrediting imperial mission displays more of its true colors than it did when it was bickering over the mandate of heaven and whether it was time for the Han to persist or another empire to rise. However, its period of transition cannot compare to the finale of the finish that will be Volume Four, and with shelter-in-place legal measures currently in place, I may be approaching the end far more swiftly than I would have thought otherwise.
The beginning of this volume seemed much a continuation of the previous two: Xuande ruling, Kongming plotting, Zhang Fei running (and being surprisingly strategic for once), Lord Guan eventually showing up (it takes him nine chapters to finally show up in this volume's table of contents). However, a little more than two hundred pages further, then a hundred pages after that, and final hundred subsequently is all that it takes to shift the tableau from the purview of the familiar to the duty of the young; even the greatly maligned in propaganda enemy is forced to pass on the throne by the vagaries of betrayal, heresy, and more likely than not some amount of disease and/or ill health. During this period also occurs some smaller notable events such as an extremely queer lord and vassal stripping-and-getting-drunk scene (the words "You are my most deserving vassal, with whom I shall share every glory and success," especially that last bit, seem a bit marriage-vow-ish, no?); another woman fighter (barely any pages devoted, but her being the descendant of a fire god is quite fantastic); and the previously referenced imperialism sequence, the latter complete with intentionally sensational descriptions of the natives, including "When women grew to maturity, they bathed in a stream where male and female mixed freely and coupled without parental prohibition, a practice called "learning the art."" Falls right in line with Euro/Neo-Euro half salacious, half disgusted, always dehumanizing viewpoint towards everyone else, doesn't it? Anyway, postcolonial analysis aside, this volume marked a significant shift in the narrative that makes the back cover's summary deceptive, if not an outright lie. The good thing is, I'm not feeling nearly as burnt out at this stage as I was with [b:The Journey to the West|158788|The Journey to the West, Volume 1 (Journey to the West)|Wu Cheng'en|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347567532l/158788._SY75_.jpg|153262] or [b:The Story of the Stone|139874|The Golden Days (The Story of the Stone #1)|Xueqin Cao|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551975644l/139874._SY75_.jpg|17619004], so either my reading strategy is working, or this work is better than expected. Or both.
What struck me most of all about this volume is when my favorite character won a battle and then basically all but stated that war crimes exist and he had just committed one. As much as this work is borderline fantasy propaganda at times, that moment, 1600 pages in, is truly awe-inspiring; it goes to show how much humanity has progressed, and perhaps regressed, that I don't consider the mass annihilation through fire and bombardment of 30,000 military personnel in a single sweep of battle all that bad. Learn from history else you commit the same, even if the history's got some magical fanfic flung into it in order to better convince the descendants that the way things fell out was all due to a righteous battle for the holy and the just. In these days of enforced quarantine, I wonder how far the government is going to push it once coronavirus isn't as much of a concern, and how much people will give up for the sake of money, or stability, or the fact that they can't imagine turning into the monsters they've read about in elementary school textbooks and seen splayed and murdered on the big screen. Half a century has gone by and more since Luo Guangzhong had no small amount of influence on these pages, and almost a millennium has progressed since the conflicts he wrote about reduced a population from nearly sixty million to a little more than fifteen million, and I'm feeling rather morose about how things are going to fall out now. Still, I suppose it's a boon that I decided to read this now: China isn't perfect, but my lord, then and now, is it amazing.
P.S. I ran out of space while typing this volume up, so you can see my thoughts on Volumes 1 & 2 here.
To gratify the desires of ear and eye without properly calculating the economic strength of the multitude is the sure road to oblivion.Three and a half months later, I feel some amount of triumph and some amount of fatigue, and the book, while definitely a contributor, is hardly a significant one this far down the road. If you had told beginning me that end me would finish in the middle of a pandemic, freaking out would be a drastic understatement when describing the reaction. Having lived through it all while reading this, I imagine I'm actually able to believe more in the continuity of my existence through January was Volume 1, February was Volume 2, etc, etc, rather than January was potential WWIII, February was the fallout from Kobe Bryant, March was three months long, April is coming up on three decades long, and so on and so forth. Now, why did I like this better than both [b:The Journey to the West|158788|The Journey to the West, Volume 1 (Journey to the West)|Wu Cheng'en|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347567532l/158788._SY75_.jpg|153262] and [b:The Story of the Stone|139874|The Golden Days (The Story of the Stone #1)|Xueqin Cao|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551975644l/139874._SY75_.jpg|17619004]? I suppose, due to this being in a more holistic form than the other two, Stockholm Syndrome was better able to work its insidious smoothing over of tedium and in order to more efficiently connect the moments of spectacle, pathos, cavalry, reversal, downfall, and triumph, until I found myself reading almost 200 pages of end material (including the foreword, for whatever reason) and reveling in it all once again. Also, I've come to realize the joy I take in connecting the dots of the world in terms of both time and space, and Guanzhong's (supposedly, but that's so often the deal with many of these works in that area of the world that I just roll with it) is so inextricably grounded in the goal of doing such that, especially when further contextualized by the Manchus and the Mongols and the propagandizing and the ever popular narrative of the underdog true king ('Lord of the Rings' Aragorn, anyone?), I couldn't help but appreciate it more deeply than I would a fantasy villain-of-the-week religious parable or the decline and fall of an exorbitantly wealthy bildungsroman.
At the beginning of this volume, pretty much every character that the narrative had chosen to significantly invest development in back in the first volume was dead. Kongming/Zhuge Liang, my favorite, not introduced until the second volume, was still kicking, but he would be in his coffin ten chapters. Still, he was destined to terrorize his enemies through trickery and more supernatural means up until the point that the author made the spirit transcend its human loyalties and advocate for imperial unity no matter what. I latched onto a few other full names and general surnames in order keep afloat, and slowly but surely Cao shifted to Sima and both Bei and Sun fell into the same calumny that that work presented as the primary destabilization of the Han emperor around two thousand pages to go. Honestly, the most notable thing to me was how much Kongming fell apart when it came to martial prowess, but considering what the afterword had to say about how many popular accounts of that man's life inflated his strategy skills, I suppose both the author and the editor of this particular edition (the one who holistically re-calibrated with utter abandon the more factually straightforward tale into their preferred piece of moralizing, if appreciative, literature) had to tone it down a bit, else the historically accurate collapse of all of Kongming's ambitions couldn't have conceivably happened, could it have. Other than that, Jiang Wei, a defecting minor general who became supremely major once all the big names were gone, carried me through until almost the very tail end of two empires finally surrendering to the third, and then, in some ways in an extremely deflated fashion, the civil war was over and the empire was whole. Descendants not living up to the image of their ancestors and all that.
By the end, I was completely caught up in the sociopolitical commentary that could be easily applied to contemporary times. For example, people rightfully make a big deal of of Confucius' onerous hierarchical absolutism, but part of that long ago and wildly influential thinker's doctrine is the fact that "the responsibility for disorder rests on those above," and these days, my own government has nearly 700,000 plague infections and 37,000 plague deaths on their plate as the result of obtuse mismanagement, opportunistic bigotry, and pure greed. That utmost need for leadership to be both morally and capably fit of ruling ('virtue' and 'talent' are the exact words used) beyond all restraints of blood kinship is the other side of the conflict between inheritance and merit, and so much of this book in its contents, construction, and legacy is tied up in how much fate favors one or the other and how hard humans try to adapt their story as a metaphor for their own success, failures, and chance for revenge/redemption. I mentioned LotR earlier, and near the very tail end of finishing this, I became rather caught up in the idea that Tolkien had to have read this work, or heard of it, or something, because the parallels just get ridiculous after a while (it'll be fun rereading [b:The Silmarilion] after this). The first attempt at Anglo translation of this work was back in 1925, so it's not a wildly outrageous theory, and the whole 'oh some things are just universal' has become an increasingly unacceptable argument in my mind. In other words, yet another angle for my furious brain to embark upon when it comes to constructing a reason for why I tackled 2300+ pages of a work I have little to no academic training for intuitive context and absolutely no fluency for direct understanding. Honestly, though, like some if you ask them why they want(ed) to climb Mt. Everest, I read it cause it was there, and unlike that more (in)famous activity, I didn't risk leaving my rotting corpse or guarantee my leaving a bunch of trash that'll slowly slip down as the thermometer goes up and be yet another instance of postcolonial blight for humanity to disproportionately contend with. Will they be reading this work 3600 years after the portrayed events, much as I do 1800 years after? I hope so.
I'm finished with this, and yet I want to read more. There are commentaries on Zhuge Liang in all forms and flavors, histories of the interaction of 'Three Kingdoms' with the various dynasties, debates over the veracity of various historical personas, analyses of the amazingly fervent and ginormous Lord Guan/Guan Yu cult(s) (did I mention that a reference to him showed up in a Greek mythology fighter video game that's currently being developed?), and histories upon histories upon histories, from Chinggis/Genghis Khan to how the Mandate of Heaven was translated into government policy upon the official end of the dynastic train. I also don't want to deal with any of that until next year at the very earliest, because much as this ended well, I am utterly sick of having a quarter of my reading capacity blocked off for months months upon months. I suppose I should make some recommendation regarding how readers interested in this should best prepare for, but honestly, if you're not the type to have wandered into the list of Longest Novels of All Time a while ago and thought that that would make for a good bucket list if modulated accordingly, your best bet is cutting your teeth on some of the more modest 1000+ page works. My inspiration was likely first spawned by the tales my friends told of the omnipresent and omnitedious Chinese school that they attended on the weekends, wherein they were made to memorize entire lists of dynasties and associated material. I got some of that during the afterword, and I gotta say: some of it's kinda cool.
The world's affairs rush on, an endless stream;
A sky-told fate, infinite in reach, dooms all.
The kingdoms three are now the stuff of dream,
For men to ponder, past all praise or blame
Spoiler
P.S. I get that this is a super long work, but a typo in those last four lines that I chose not to indicate cause it'd look a a tad pathetic? I'm already planning for my next read of a future, and ideally better, edition.Volume Three
This volume marks my necessary shift in perspective from a 'Lord of the Rings' style narrative to a succession of dynasties à la Game of Thrones, albeit with every main character from the first volume being struck down rather than each embarking on their own disparate survival-of-the-fittest quest far across land and sea. Both of the figureheads of the film Red Cliff
Spoiler
, Liu Bei/Xuande and Cao Cao,The beginning of this volume seemed much a continuation of the previous two: Xuande ruling, Kongming plotting, Zhang Fei running (and being surprisingly strategic for once), Lord Guan eventually showing up (it takes him nine chapters to finally show up in this volume's table of contents). However, a little more than two hundred pages further, then a hundred pages after that, and final hundred subsequently is all that it takes to shift the tableau from the purview of the familiar to the duty of the young; even the greatly maligned in propaganda enemy is forced to pass on the throne by the vagaries of betrayal, heresy, and more likely than not some amount of disease and/or ill health. During this period also occurs some smaller notable events such as an extremely queer lord and vassal stripping-and-getting-drunk scene (the words "You are my most deserving vassal, with whom I shall share every glory and success," especially that last bit, seem a bit marriage-vow-ish, no?); another woman fighter (barely any pages devoted, but her being the descendant of a fire god is quite fantastic); and the previously referenced imperialism sequence, the latter complete with intentionally sensational descriptions of the natives, including "When women grew to maturity, they bathed in a stream where male and female mixed freely and coupled without parental prohibition, a practice called "learning the art."" Falls right in line with Euro/Neo-Euro half salacious, half disgusted, always dehumanizing viewpoint towards everyone else, doesn't it? Anyway, postcolonial analysis aside, this volume marked a significant shift in the narrative that makes the back cover's summary deceptive, if not an outright lie. The good thing is, I'm not feeling nearly as burnt out at this stage as I was with [b:The Journey to the West|158788|The Journey to the West, Volume 1 (Journey to the West)|Wu Cheng'en|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347567532l/158788._SY75_.jpg|153262] or [b:The Story of the Stone|139874|The Golden Days (The Story of the Stone #1)|Xueqin Cao|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1551975644l/139874._SY75_.jpg|17619004], so either my reading strategy is working, or this work is better than expected. Or both.
What struck me most of all about this volume is when my favorite character won a battle and then basically all but stated that war crimes exist and he had just committed one. As much as this work is borderline fantasy propaganda at times, that moment, 1600 pages in, is truly awe-inspiring; it goes to show how much humanity has progressed, and perhaps regressed, that I don't consider the mass annihilation through fire and bombardment of 30,000 military personnel in a single sweep of battle all that bad. Learn from history else you commit the same, even if the history's got some magical fanfic flung into it in order to better convince the descendants that the way things fell out was all due to a righteous battle for the holy and the just. In these days of enforced quarantine, I wonder how far the government is going to push it once coronavirus isn't as much of a concern, and how much people will give up for the sake of money, or stability, or the fact that they can't imagine turning into the monsters they've read about in elementary school textbooks and seen splayed and murdered on the big screen. Half a century has gone by and more since Luo Guangzhong had no small amount of influence on these pages, and almost a millennium has progressed since the conflicts he wrote about reduced a population from nearly sixty million to a little more than fifteen million, and I'm feeling rather morose about how things are going to fall out now. Still, I suppose it's a boon that I decided to read this now: China isn't perfect, but my lord, then and now, is it amazing.
From the hilltop Kongming looked down upon the incinerated men strewn over the valley. Most of them had had their heads and faces pulverized by the falling missiles. An unbearable stench rose from their corpses. Kongming wept and sighed at the carnage. "Whatever service to the shrines of Han this represents, my life-span will be shortened for it," he said.
P.S. I ran out of space while typing this volume up, so you can see my thoughts on Volumes 1 & 2 here.