Number 62 - The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck

 This month's book group read was this relatively obscure novel from 1930. Pearl Buck grew up in China, the child of missionaries, and spent most of her life there. She taught in Chinese universities when she wasn't writing. As she says on the back cover of this rather old penguin edition, her chief pleasure  and interest had always been people, and since she lived amongst the Chinese, Chinese people.

This is a story of the Chinese, told in microcosm through the story of a farmer Wang Lung. Wang Lung was a peasant who bought a slave girl from a local great house to be his bride.  The bride, O-lan, sorts his house out, bears him lots of children, and her decisions are instrumental in his rags to riches story. 

I'm sure there are a lot of parallels and references I don't understand since my knowledge of Chinese history is sketchy at best.

This covers the life of the farmer from a desperately poor peasant in his twenties, working his fields, to his dotage as a very old man.  In that time he deals with droughts, villainous relatives, second wives and moody offspring.

What is quite disturbing in this book is the attitudes towards women.  If this was written by a man it would be somewhat unbelievable, but since it isn't, it's worrying how close, historically  speaking, this book is set. O-Lan is directly responsible for Wang-Lung's success.  All the decisions that instigate his rise in society come from her.

But he treats her like a slave and only shows concern when she falls ill. And then it's mainly worry about who will clean and tidy. he still criticises her for having too big feet.

The writing in the book makes no judgements on any of the characters though, even when Wang Lung starts cheating on his wife and spending all their money on his new woman. The writing remains impartial and arguably quite dry. The reader is left to judge the characters based on their actions and Wang Lung is frequently frustrating.

Her missionary background shows through in the prose.  It frequently reads like the King James Bible- "And thus it came to pass..." and similar phrasing used throughout.

One distinct flaw in the book is a classic case of Women Writing Men, where the motivations she ascribes to Wang Lung are totally unbelievable with regards to his love life.

It may be that that is down to an allusion to Chinese history that I've missed entirely, but without lots of research, I have no way of knowing. And I do have a life outside of reading and writing this blog.

Another thing that bugged me was how many children she had for him.  Even when they were living for a year in a lean-to made of a half a dozen mats slung against the wall of a great house in a city in the south, she still fell pregnant. Where were they finding alone time? They already had at least two children living with them (and Wang Lung's decrepit father). This is especially strange given the revelation in chapter one that no person had seen Wang Lung unclothed for several years. It seems that his shyness must have evaporated somewhere down the line.

This is an absorbing and interesting (if occasionally frustrating) read throughout. I'm glad I read it and I'm tempted to find the sequels.

It's available from most good bookshops and online in much more recent versions.  Although this edition does win the best smelling book I've read this year by a country mile.