Love Prevails in 'Surrendered'

Greek mythology tells of King Erysicthon, the ‘Earth-tearer’ who offends Demeter by felling a tree sacred to the goddess. As punishment, Demeter orders Famine to inhabit Erysicthon’s stomach. Cursed with a voracious hunger, the king sells all of his possessions—and his daughter—for food. Eventually, wrought with despair, Erysicthon devours himself.

In Chang-Rae Lee’s “The Surrendered,” such a plight of insatiable need afflicts Hector Brennan and June Singer, war survivors whose lives are unwillingly but unavoidably entwined by the aftermath of the Korean War. Fundamentally a contemporary war novel, “The Surrendered” derives its plot from a scrutiny of the most basic of human experiences—love and conflict. Though beleaguered with a requisite love triangle and sometimes seized by paroxysms of sentiment, the novel is a paradigm of narrative layering—a finely crafted story that revels in stripping away an illusory front of beauty to expose the brutality beneath.

In the 1950s, June is one of many children orphaned by the Korean War. Rescued from certain death by Hector, a soldier with a tormented past, they escape to an orphanage where they meet Sylvie Tanner, a reverend’s wife. For this indigent pair, Sylvie appears to be a pillar of salvation, a testament to love’s resilience in the face of war.

But Sylvie—haunted by the shocking cruelty of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s—may be the most damaged of all. The daughter of murdered missionaries, Sylvie has devoted her life to altruism. Yet for her beneficiaries, Sylvie’s presence teeters precipitously between providing mercy and causing pain. Her relentless need to numb herself to the vibrancy of life—to escape into the dulling throes of opium—destroys Hector, June, and her husband, who find it impossible to sever their connection to this fading woman and her elusive love.

The novel skips through time and space, forward and backwards from Korea to China to 1980s New York, where June, who has now become a profitable antiques dealer, has stomach cancer—an irony that does not escape the woman who once starved for weeks as a child. Realizing that death draws near, she seeks out Hector to help her track down her estranged son, Nicholas. The difficult journey brings them to Italy, where in a final moment of redemption, Hector and June arrive together at a hallowed church that recalls the ghostly memory of Sylvie’s betrayal.

Lee’s mastery of storytelling lies in portraying the self-destructive natures of these characters without dramatizing their failures. Hector is a self-loathing, libidinous man graced with good looks and good luck; June, a disimpassioned, selfish woman whose adolescent urge to cause trouble transforms into a flinty resolve. They self-medicate with alcohol and analgesics, their compulsion not dissimilar to the reason for Sylvie’s own addiction. Like the ill-fated Erysicthon, they devour themselves, and yet for all their indulgence in masochistic punishment, they cannot wrench free from the consequences of their war-torn pasts. The author of three previous novels centered on the immigrant experience, Lee is still preoccupied with tropes of alienation, estrangement, and a loss of identity. “The Surrendered” simply concerns emigrants of time rather than location.

“Authenticity ultimately lay in the story you could tell, a tale most effective when it was at once fanciful and mundane,” Lee writes. The author manages just this: he manipulates a realism tinged with bouts of fantasy, a world where grime and dirt hug the guts and souls of individuals who would otherwise appear beautifully intact. Hector’s bruises heal within the span of a day, but the wounds beneath lie rank, sore to the touch of Sylvie’s ghost, who—preserved in his nightmares—veils her own ruin: “Sylvie Tanner, looming naked before him, perfectly alive and beautiful, her skin aglow with a pure unrivaled shimmer…would tuck her fingers beneath her fine skin and then, with no effort at all, no pain, peel it off as if it were a full-length glove. She’d do the same with the other arm, and then start in with her torso, pull it down with a terrible measure, down over her breasts, her belly, slowly skinning herself and revealing to him not blood and tissue but the charred ruins of her insides, all blackness and collapse.”

Lee’s hypnotic, poetic writing poses a stark contrast to the horrifying revelations that creep within the plot of “The Surrendered.” His serpentine prose constantly obscures the crime to be committed next, but his treatment of violence is more invested in details than gratuity, so when they occur—abruptly, though not necessarily unpredictably—they serve to emphasize the remote helplessness of the victim. In Manchuria, the Japanese cut off the eyelids of one of Sylvie’s companions in order to force him watch her be raped. Years later, in Korea, Hector is commanded to kill a tortured prisoner of war, but cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. The young bugler, legs broken beneath him, grabs a grenade from Hector’s belt, but allows Hector to flee the area before removing the pin. Lee plays on the dichotomy between the sufferer, deprived even of the right to die, and the voyeur, who is too infatuated with life to euthanize his victim.

“The Surrendered” is, finally, a romance obscured in sorrow—a ballad of Hector and June’s love affairs with life. Both are prone to fighting—Hector with his fists and June with her cold contempt—but they fight hard because of the imminent isolation threatening to consume them whole. They recognize that war has rendered them forever incomplete, lacking any conviction in human solidarity. Hector, musing about the war, sees a couple embracing: “They were both slight of frame and not tall, and if he hadn’t known them he would have mistaken them for youths in thrall of a complicated and passionate first love. Then they were kissing, quite tenderly, and Hector was reminded that while rife disorder ruled this world, there was also human tendency and need (however misguided, however wrong) forever tilting against it. Love was the prime defiance, of course, most every story told of that, though well short of love there was the simple law of association, just nearness and contact.”

For love—even frayed with the passing of time and the burden of human imperfection—never altogether diminishes. Rather, it threads the intertwining fates of those men and women who, by virtue of a mutual history, obligation, or compassion, have surrendered to its unrelenting insatiability.

—Staff writer Denise J. Xu can be reached at dxu@fas.harvard.edu.