Romance Of The Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

Once again I find myself judging an ancient work of literature by modern standards, which is spectacularly unfair, but only to be expected. In this case, the unfairness is all the more horrid of me in that "Romance Of The Three Kingdoms" is one of four classics of Chinese literature that all admire. Thus, my opinion of this work, being that of a modern reader and a Westerner to boot, who has no familiarity with Chinese culture, is probably worth even less than it might be. You have been warned.

The facts are as follows: the "Romance" first appeared in the 1520s, but deals with events that occurred about 1300 years previously and extended over a little more than a century. For that reason it is sometimes referred to as the first historical novel. It's 800,000 words long, or about 1600 pages, and includes well over 1000 characters. It starts with the decline of the 200-year-old Han dynasty, which decline eventually shatters the area covered by modern-day China into three separate states. All of these, naturally, attempt to conquer the other two and reunite the state. It takes them about 120 years to do this, at which point the Chin dynasty establishes itself. There's an enormous amount of incident, personal conflict, bloody battle, clever strategy, intrigue, activity both noble and ignoble. With all apologies, I'm afraid I found it breathtakingly boring in spots.

As I said, I have no business making a judgment like that, but I'm going to do it anyway. Why? Because I devoted several months to reading the darn thing and the least you can do is allow me to vent.

Okay, what's so boring? To be fair, it's mostly the battle scenes that I find so dull – if there was more of the political and personal wrangling I might have had more patience. Unfortunately the battles take up enormous swaths of space and they're all the same. Someone marches into someone else's territory at the head of some army, the leader rides out ahead and offers battle, a leader of the opposition rides out to engage him, they make a few dozen passes at each other but no one gets a clear advantage, so they both retreat. Once in a while the invading army comes to a gated city, stands outside and bellows insults, the inhabitants of the city ignore them until they run out of food, then there's a battle (generally announced by bombs, fires, and/or drums) and something or other happens.

Surprisingly often, this siege of the city is meant to distract the enemy from the invading army's attack on another location, which when discovered causes the fooled leader to remark on how excellent a soldier his opponent is. You'd think these leaders would eventually realize that they're being shafted again.

Once the battle is over, the victorious invader distributes whatever weapons, horses, and armor are left behind, and does something called "soothing the people," which apparently means he assures the locals that the soldiers won't bother them. With that much war going on, that sounds like an excellent idea.

On top of all this, the number of times that commanders and soldiers desert to the opposing army without fighting at all is pretty astonishing when you consider how much talk there is of honor.

In short, when it comes to war itself, the "Romance" is pretty much a long series of variations on a theme. Which is fine, except when it takes 1600 pages to work out.

I confess, by the way, the definite likelihood that someone familiar with the Chinese language would certainly have less trouble with this tale than I did, if only because the characters' names are so similar to my ear. Add to this the fact that many of the characters have two or three names – the hero Liu Pei, for instance, also has the "personal" name Yuan-te – and I often didn't know who was who on which side. That's my problem, of course, not the book's and certainly not the Chinese language's, but it still doesn't make the "Romance" any easier to read.

Having spewed all this invective, I did enjoy some things here. We get the theme of the piece right up front – "States fall asunder and reunite; empires wax and wane". As that statement implies, there's a certain amount of political philosophy to be found in the "Romance", and a certain amount of advice on what makes a good leader, all of it pretty fatalistic. What's more, despite my occasional confusion regarding who is who, there's enough material here in the long run to show us who the heroes are and who the villains, broadly speaking – who adheres to the classic virtues and who lusts for power, for instance. There are few female characters to be found, but many of them are as virtuous and strong as the men – sometimes moreso. And there is a certain satisfaction at watching China reunite at the conclusion, although I for one found the eventual victor which absorbs the other two states rather unexpected.

On balance, though, it still didn't do much for me. In reading about this work, I discovered that Chinese teachers sometimes have trouble getting the kids to read their school assignments instead of the "Romance". Once again, with all due respect, I can't imagine why.

Benshlomo says, You don't always get what you want, especially when encountering another culture.