The Surrendered - Chang-rae Lee

The incident told at the start of Chang-rae Lee's latest novel was inspired by the experience of the author's father as a child in 1950, a North Korean citizen evacuated as the war intensified between North and South. His father's experience here transmogrified into the attempt of June Han to flee with her younger brother and sister, it's a heart-wrenching episode that sets the tone for what is to follow. Unexpectedly however, much of the remainder of the novel relates to an older June living in New York in the 1980s, who is suffering from a terminal illness and has just sold up her antique business, planning to go searching not for any of her lost siblings during the war, but for her son Nicholas - a young boy with a troubled childhood who has disappeared and is suspected to be living a life of fraud and petty crime in Italy. 

The location and time period may change, but essentially the characteristics set out at the beginning of the novel remain constant. This is a book about damaged people - people who have seen things and undergone experiences that no-one can be expected to come through unscathed. There are several other characters who would appear to be peripheral to June in their shared experience of the war - Hector, an American GI posted on the unenviable duty of grave detail in the Korean war, and Sylvie, the wife of the minister running a Korean refugee camp with a traumatic experience of the war in China - but in reality their stories and backgrounds are just as important, opening out the story considerably, examining their own troubled backgrounds that bring them all together at one point in the same refugee camp. It's the coming together of the people with their own individual personalities, past experiences, problems and expectations that creates a dangerous powder-keg of complex emotions that are to have a huge importance on the direction of their lives. 

The Surrendered consequently is certainly complicated, the author having to navigate and interweave the personalities of each of the main characters and their backstory experiences, but Chang-rae Lee handles this masterfully, structuring the novel brilliantly. There's no simplified alternate chaptering system here between past and present, from character to character and, barring one central incident (an unnecessary and bizarrely staged accident that reunites two of the characters), the author lays everything out in the most natural way possible. The present often gives way to memories of the past, since everything is of course interrelated - which is evidently what the author wants to show. It's not June's story, and her condition and experiences are not standalone experiences - they involve others and the experience of others dictate how they relate to her. 

The Surrendered can be tough going then, the author taking on quite a lot in his in-depth examination of several personalities, their back stories and their interconnectedness - particularly when those stories are highly traumatic ones that have left the characters permanently damaged. But any difficulties with reading the novel lie not within the fine writing or the expert structuring, but within the weight of horrendous wartime experiences of the characters and their struggles to adapt to a normal life. This is such a powerful and well-written book however that the misery is something worth enduring for the dazzling and inspirational rays of light that ultimately shine through the gloom.