“It’s the fucking Chinese…”

Spoiler Alert – This section contains details about Part 1 of Son of Heaven.

My initial reactions and thoughts on Part 1: The Last Year of the Old World, after the break…

It’s great to be back in the Chung Kuo saddle with Part 1 of Son of Heaven. These first chapters introduce several characters, closely knit residents of Purbeck. After a celebratory gathering of the townspeople, which led to our main man Jake being involved in a brief but adulterous encounter with his best friend’s wife — and late wife’s sister. Then there’s the typical post-apocalyptic scenario of the arduous trek to the market town — we’ve seen this before in stories from Waterworld to Jericho, but despite this, the scene doesn’t disappoint. We get our first bit of action in and the characters are developed nicely. In the market, there’s an air of looming threat that Jake can’t quite pinpoint, and it all culminates on the final point of the novel – a Chinese craft is seen by our ragtag gang as it celebrates at the local pub.

So far, Son of Heaven satisfies. Fans of the old series should delight at the new material, and newcomers should enjoy thoroughly as well – as expected, no knowledge whatsoever of the original series is required to get into this book, which is a prequel for some of us and the introductory pages for others.

I’m drawing some cursory parallels between Jake/Peter and Li Shai Tung/Li Yuan — a strong yet subtly flawed father who has lost his wife and a love-struck boy — but, admittedly I’m probably just looking too far into it. The writing also seem a bit simpler than the original series, not detrimentally so, but noticeably.

A glance at the Table of Contents indicates that Part 2 takes place 22 years before Part 1. Temporally non-linear storytelling isn’t something I can recall before in Wingrove’s work, at least within the same novel (the second Myst book, The Book of Ti’ana, takes place before first and third), so I’m looking forward to getting to it tonight!

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