This is one of those "Emperor's New Clothes" books for me. The cover and inside first pages are full of glowing reviews from reputable sources: "marvelous," "brilliant," "haunting," "riveting," and so forth and so on. And I'm over here saying, "But wait, are we talking about the same book? I don't see any of that at all." Obviously, somebody is mistaken.
On Such a Full Sea is yet another dystopian/literary fiction crossbreed, the story taking place in some future time when society has splintered into fragments. The elite live in villages called Charters, with mansions and servants and boutique shopping. The workers who produce the goods required by the elite live in labor colonies, where they maintain a middle-class lifestyle, although somewhat crowded together. The rest live in the counties, where they exist in a hard-scrabble and lawless environment. Fan, a teenaged fish tank diver in B-Mor, a colony which produces fish and vegetables for the Charters, leaves her home to search for her boyfriend who has mysteriously disappeared, apparently whisked away by the Charters because he is genetically immune to the fatal C disease. The stage is thus set for a journey across a potentially dangerous landscape where she encounters a series of perils. Nothing very original here: McCarthy covered this quest scenario in The Road, and the plot device was not original with him.
The story of Fan's quest is told in third person plural, presumably by the collective voice of her fellow residents of B-Mor (once Baltimore), giving it the flavor of oral mythology, particularly because the details of the journey could not, in reality, have been known to the tellers of the tale. Consequently, Fan never seems to be a real person; her feelings and thoughts are unknown. That also means that the reader has no emotional investment in her fate, no more than he would be concerned about the success of Jason (of Golden Fleece fame). This is one of the most emotionally detached modern novels I have ever read.
But perhaps the most bothersome aspect of the novel for me was that Lee's dystopian world just didn't make logical sense. With roadways in disrepair and no rail service and lawlessness in the land, how did the many luxury goods from the labor colonies even get to the Charters? Why would the mere fact of Fan's having left B-Mor make her a subject of folk legend? This is certainly a very "thin" description of a society and its structure.
The best dystopian novels are those which serve as warnings, taking current disturbing trends and following them to logical tragic conclusions. That's why 1984 is still referenced today when we observe our own government's surveillance of its citizens. As far as I can tell, the only warning here would concern the stratified class system and the almost insurmountable difficulty of rising from one class to a higher. Certainly we see that trend in America today. Yet, Fan merely observes events and in no permanent way solves or even attempts to solve the problem. This whole novel seems to be to be a pointless adventure tale, without much originality or merit.
I've said my piece. It's up to others to offer reasons why I am wrong.
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