Progressions through travel

Condemmed pub on Hackney RoadAfter finishing the latest novel, I’m unsure as to whether I like it or not. I was mildly annoyed with the writing style while reading it, but in retrospect I think it adds an interesting element to the narrative especially when looking at it as a travel fiction. The broken English that Guo uses as Z’s speech throughout the book allows the reader to slip into the feeling of being completely lost and foreign in a new country. The way she describes things really lets the reader understand and remember what it is like to arrive in a new place. She depicts the atmosphere of not knowing any of a country’s customs, culture, or language incredibly well.

This is ongoing within her travels through the continent as well. Every time she moves on to a new place she is confronted with the same inept feeling as she was when she first arrived in London. However, I thought that there was an interesting progression in her travels. As she moved along more and more she seemed to be much more at ease with this clueless feeling than she was initially. I thought that this was an interesting depiction of the progression of a traveler, in the tourist/traveler spectrum we have been discussing throughout the semester. She starts off as the clueless tourist constantly holding a dictionary and, if she hadn’t met the “you” male character, a guidebook, yet as she progresses she becomes much more of a traveler. She feels comfortable meeting new people and letting them show her around their cities. She doesn’t feel the same sense of anxiety about differences and the unknown as she did in the beginning. She even says that she finally was able to be on her own, even though she doesn’t want to be necessarily.

I took issue with several aspects of the book however. First, I find it highly unrealistic that she would meet such nice people everywhere she goes, especially as the first person she meets in each place. Even the man who seemingly rapes her is not an evil person and shows a compassionate side. Her trip and the ease with which she meets all these men seems a bit contrived to me. I expected that at some point in her travels she would have met a more sinister character like Robert from The Comfort of Strangers. Second, the writing and her English doesn’t seem to progress in a logical manner to me. Rather than a slow progression, Guo takes a sudden switch from it being completely broken to Z forming proper sentences. Even then she switches between one eloquent grammatically correct statement to another that is almost incoherent again.

Overall, I think the book does a good job at getting across its intended message. Z comes to England, learns what she is meant to and goes back to China a more enriched and open-minded person. I liked the last chapter where you get a glimpse of her life after her return even though she seems still very much hung up on her lover.