WORDS: Eavan Gaffney
Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement begins on an interesting premise; a chronicle of the lives of an American mother and her Chinese-American daughter, centred mostly on their respective experiences working as first-class courtesans in turn-of-the-century Shanghai. However, though it sprawls itself across almost fifty years, three generations and 608 pages, Tan’s interesting premise fails to become much more than just that. In actuality, as this rambling tale reaches its conclusion, it becomes somewhat difficult to ascertain what exactly (or even vaguely) the story was ultimately supposed to be about.
Tan is probably recognisable to most as the author of the 1989 bestseller The Joy Luck Club, a novel which concerns itself with similar territory. Here, however, both her plot and its characters seem to become unmoored at quite an early stage of the story. And it’s a long story. Violet serves as the readers’ eyes and ears in this world, through a fairly persistent first-person narration for the majority of the novel. There are one or two odd deviations early in the text, where suddenly the narration switches to someone else — either Violet’s mother Lulu, or her mentor Magic Gourd, for a short time, and then back again. This is not rendered any less disconcerting by the fact that this switch is repeated more purposefully, and for a longer time later in the text. This later switch is a firm “handing-over” of the story to another narrator. At times it feels like the reader is simply swimming in a sea of happenings, with no indication as to where they are, where they’re going, or when it’s all likely to end. There is no visible arc, climax point or narrative drive. In short, it all falls a bit flat.
Many masterpieces have taken a similar route. Unfortunately, the flatness in the structure is only compounded by an even more disappointing flatness in what it encases: in particular, the superficiality of the protagonist, Violet, as a character. Despite the fact that the reader spends roughly the first 70 percent of the novel witnessing the story through her eyes and words, it’s difficult to feel any sense of closeness to her, or understanding of her, at any point. At various points Violet makes (would-be) strong statements about her own character and the effects that certain events in her life have had on it. But these seem so far removed from the reality of her actions within the text, and more importantly, the distant and vaguely monotonous voice that tells the story, as to almost be ridiculous. The same sense of distance from the character remains when the narration is taken over by Lulu later on, to the point that there is precious little difference between the two voices at all. These incidents of “telling” rather than “showing” appear as an attempt on Tan’s part to keep the characters and indeed the story itself, in focus. Instead, they serve only to highlight the hopeless blurriness that has already set in.
That is not to say that there is nothing at all to be gleaned from this novel. Indeed, it starts quite promisingly, with Violet’s ruminations on her childhood setting up great potential for rich exploration of the themes of parental abandonment, the mother-daughter relationship, the human need to be loved, and most strikingly, notions of otherness and self-hood. However, the clarity of the opening soon dwindles to obscurity, as metaphors are picked up but soon forgotten about, and the story as a whole gradually loses its motive, and in doing so, dissolves the reader’s motivation to keep reading.
The stilted dialogue, the inconsistencies in characterisation, and the distance between story and reader that these ultimately lead to mean that, peculiarly, the novel reads somewhat like a work of translation – and not a good one at that. This is interesting, however, from the point of view that the story is mostly set in China, among people who – we are led to understand – communicate mostly in Chinese. It is possible, or even probable that the strange aloofness of the text arises at least partly from this attempt at a cultural transposition; at trying to replicate Chinese speech patterns through English, for example. However, though an understanding of this might explain some of the novel’s peculiarities, it does not compensate for them. Rather than the “Amazement” of the title, Tan’s novel incites a kind of dull bafflement.
