The Poppy War

RF Kuang’s The Poppy War isn’t exactly on the top tier of fantasy hype, but it’s certainly far from the bottom. With Kuang also winning acclaim and (I assume) strong sales for Babel and Yellowface, that means she’s seeing the kind of cross-genre success that comes very rarely in the publishing industry.

I tried reading Babel a while back and couldn’t get into it. Having now finished The Poppy War, I have to report that I’m currently zero for two on Kuang’s books. What I heard is that it’s a brutal, mature political fantasy about the horrors of war. What I found when I cracked it open for myself was depressingly familiar: an adult fantasy novel with the tone, prose and complexity of a YA novel, and a plot messy enough to make me seriously believe that it might actually have been one until fairly late in its gestation process.

The Poppy War is about a fantasy version of the Second Sino-Japanese War, aka when Imperial Japan invaded China in the years prior to WWII. Instead of China we have Nikan, a once-mighty empire now held together–barely–by a ruthless empress and the squabbling warlords who just about maintain fealty to her, and instead of Japan it’s the Federation of Mugen, which is…well, Japan. Not Fantasy Japan, it’s basically just real-life Japan, circa 1935, but with a different name and a lower technology level to fit the fantasy setting.

Our protagonist is Rin, a teenage war orphan who gets out of an arranged marriage by passing the civil service exam and entering a prestigious military academy (more because it’s the only such institute that doesn’t charge tuition fees than out of any deep-seated desire to be a military officer).

This opening act with Rin living in poverty and scrabbling to pass the exams reminded me very strongly of a certain other fantasy series involving tuition and academic scholarship as central plot devices, but mercifully, this book gets Rin into the academy at Sinegard far quicker than it took Kvothe to finally reach whatever his version of wizard school was.

So having had the good sense to speed through this bit, I’m sure the book will similarly breeze through Rin’s education and training and get her on the frontlines of the war against Mugen in no time, right?

Right?

Wait what’s this, why is Rin getting into arguments with an annoying bully character? Why is she fighting with a stuck-up rich girl in the dorms? Aren’t we spending an awful lot of time on Rin and her fellow classmates going to different classes and oh God it’s high school, they’re in high school this is just another YA novel pretending to be adult fantasy whhhhhyyyyyyyyy

Okay, I need to be fair, that isn’t entirely true. Only the first half of the Poppy War is Secret YA. The second half is very different both in plot and tone, to the extent that it feels like these were two different stories stitched together. There are even some points where it seems like the badly-threaded seams are visible: while the first half of the book is firmly low-tech fantasy with swords and arrows, in the second half the characters are suddenly using barbed wire and sandbags and engaging in the sort of block-by-block urban combat that I don’t think pre-firearm warfare really consisted of, Mugen has chlorine gas weapons and secret science labs, and there are references to soldiers “shooting” people in contexts where it sounds like they’re using bullets instead of arrows.

Also, the book goes from twee Fantasy High School adventures to graphic descriptions of Mugen war crimes that are based directly on the real-life Nanjing Massacre. The stuck-up rich rival character getting rescued from a military brothel after having her mind broken by repeated sexual abuse? Yeah, probably not gonna find that in your typical teen romantasy book, even the ones that are supposed to be “dark.”

In the first half of the book, we’re told over and over again that shamans and the ability to call down the power of gods is universally believed to be a myth, based on martial artists from ages past who achieved a particularly high degree of ki manipulation…but then in the second half we find out that the Empress has an X-Men squad of shamans who openly use their powers in front of ordinary soldiers. The explanation for this contradiction is that the soldiers assume the X-Men powers are just martial arts and sleight-of-hand tricks.

One of the X-Men can transform into a fox. Another one is a water guy who lives in a barrel and is made entirely out of water. He hangs out in the mess hall in full view of dozens, if not hundreds, of other soldiers.

Clearly, something happened here, whether it was my above-speculated combining of initially-separate stories, a sloppy rewrite, or Kuang changing her mind halfway through and then not going back to edit what she had already written. (I’m personally still convinced it was at least partially that first scenario–the way the second half of the book introduces a whole new cast of supporting characters in particular just screams “this was originally a different project”).

When I mentioned the war crimes, you might have gotten the impression that the book has a bit of a tone problem, and that is absolutely the case. It’s not just the juxtaposition between the two halves. Rin experiences the Not-Nanjing Massacre alongside her comrades, a squad of anime characters who all have their own unique shounen powers and personalised weapons, one of whom is a fifteen-year-old pyromaniac demolitions expert who makes stinkbombs out of shit. This material is wildly incongruous next to piles of mutilated corpses and dead babies, like the cast of Naruto accidentally strolled into Grave Of The Fireflies.

(If you object to me comparing this to anime so much: there’s a very obvious Fist Of The North Star reference at one point, so the book itself isn’t exactly shying away from the comparison)

These elements just don’t go together. It makes the anime squad even sillier than it seemed on its own, and it means that I can’t take the book seriously when it starts expounding on the horrors of war and genocide. There’s no technique here, the book isn’t using absurdity to say anything about the darker material, it’s just a plot that you could slip right into a simplistic adventure romp for twelve year olds sitting discordantly next to Elie Wiesel’s Night. Later on the book also has a Unit 731 analogue, inserted solely (and very clumsily) to facilitate some plot developments.

I realise it’s probably irresponsible to speculate too much on an author’s mindset or process when writing, but having written a lot of stories myself, I’ve gotten good at recognizing my own mistakes when I see other people making them. It feels like RF Kuang started out writing something aimed at a younger audience, decided at some point that she actually wanted to write something deeper and more adult–an allegory for the unresolved trauma of genocide, an examination of the dehumanising effects of anger and revenge–and instead of starting over, converted the former into the latter. And look, I get it, it’s painful to scrap something when you’ve put so much work into it, but I know from personal experience that this never works out well.

Now that was a lot of complaining about the general structure of The Poppy War, but fear not—I also have lots of more specific complaints as well.

We’ve got: clunky “as you know” exposition!

“You can read. You can use an abacus. That’s not the kind of preparation it takes to pass the Keju. The Keju tests for a deep knowledge of history, advanced mathematics, logic, and the Classics …”

“The Four Noble Subjects, I know,” she said impatiently.
”

We’ve got: vague descriptions that collapse into a void periodically!

(Actually let me focus on that one a bit more. Theproblem isn’t as bad in this book as I’ve seen it in others, usually the setting description is adequate. But during battle scenes, the book tends to completely lose track of where the characters are in relation to each other. Armies appear in the middle of cities with barely a word on the process of how they got there, battalions of soldiers vanish when it’s time for the main characters to do something dramatic, Rin goes from standing on a wall overlooking an invasion to right in the thick of the battle with zero transition).

We’ve got: Whedonesque cringe-dialogue! Here’s Rin and her bestie, right after they learn that the Mugen army is marching towards them:

“It’s sort of exciting, really,” Kitay said.

“Yes,” said Rin. “We’re about to be invaded by our centuries-old enemy after they breached a peace treaty that has maintained a fragile geopolitical stability for two decades. So very exciting.”

“At least now we know we have job security,” said Kitay. “Everyone wants more soldiers.”
”

Could we be any more invaded? The Mugen army is standing right behind me, isn’t it?

“Ramsa blew up half the foreign quarter at the docks,” she reported. “Didn’t give the Warlords advance warning.”

“I blew up one building.”

“It was a big building,” Qara said flatly. “The Fifth still had two men inside.”

“Well, did they survive?” Altan asked.

Qara stared at him in disbelief. “Ramsa detonated a building on them.”
”

So uh, those war crimes sure were a thing that happened! I’m so busy detonating a building on the Fifth, I don’t even have time to explain why I detonated a building on the Fifth!

My God, why should the reader take the story seriously when the characters themselves don’t seem to? The genocide happens a few chapters after this! The earlier bit with the quirky teacher who goes around making fart noises was bad enough, but there was plenty of time between that and the later chapters to make the tone a bit more appropriate for horrific war crime descriptions.

The last big problem I had with the book is Rin as a protagonist. For the first few chapters, when she’s focused on passing the Keju exam, I actually found her very compelling. The book does a good job of speedily filling the reader in on what her deal is, what she’s trying to achieve and why, and I was engaged enough that I was pretty on the edge of my seat despite knowing full well that she was going to pass the exam.

She’s still a good main character during the chapters covering her first year at War High School, when she’s in danger of getting booted out if she doesn’t do well enough on her exams, because her motivations are still clearly communicated and understandable: she came here to escape poverty and an arranged marriage, she needs to make the grade if she wants to stay. Fine.

Things start to get a lot shakier after Rin’s first year, when she’s no longer in danger of getting expelled. As I mentioned earlier, her reason for entering this military academy in particular is entirely because it doesn’t charge tuition. She doesn’t have any particular desire to be a soldier.

Then she experiences her Secret Power for the first time and goes along with Mr. Quirky Fart Teacher when he offers to train her in shamanism basically out of self-preservation. The problem is that at some point between then and the climax of the story, the book needs her to do the whole “I AM THE FIRE AND THE POWER THAT WILL BURN THE etc” YA rebel heroine thing, but I never felt like I understood why she ends up here. Towards the end of the story, the book repeatedly throws out big, climactic character arc moments where Rin comes to some conclusion or makes a big decision, but none of them really link up with each other, or with the wider story.

It’s like the book is just throwing things at the wall in the hope that the reader will latch onto one of them as the explanation for what Rin does at the end. Personally, I could never get on board with any of it. Once the story loses that initial thread of Rin escaping her hometown, it never picks up another one to replace it with. She just does what the plot needs her to do. It doesn’t help that often the book tells us things about her—very bluntly—which then don’t really have any relevance going forward. We’re told multiple times that Rin craves approval, but that only seems to be the case when the book remembers, and there are also plenty of things she does that contradict this motivation.

During her time in the army she’s consistently rude and insubordinate, which, fine, she’s meant to be rebellious. But she’s written like someone who straight up doesn’t realise they’re in the military, getting caught off-guard over and over again when her superiors try to give her orders or tell her to knock it the fuck off with the insubordination. What happened to all the officer training she went through at the academy? Did they not drill martial discipline into these kids as part of that?

(Granted, none of the main characters ever really act like soldiers, but it’s most noticeable with Rin).

Truth be told, I eventually found Rin kind of annoying. She swings wildly back and forth between extreme emotions like despair and rage so often that it was very much like being around…well, a moody teenager. Which I guess comes with the territory when you’re reading YA but oh right, this isn’t supposed to be YA.

One last complaint before I get to my conclusion: the writing isn’t great. It’s not terrible either, but it’s got a lot of my personal bugbears, like over-using physical actions to break up dialogue. People are constantly shaking their heads, frowning, sighing, arching their eyebrows or thrusting their chins skyward. I lost count of the number of times Rin draws her knees up to her chest.

For all of my complaints with The Poppy War, here’s the thing: I read all of it. I ultimately did want to see how it ended. The book does an admirable job of keeping the plot rolling instead of settling into an immovable status quo, apart from the as-you-know dialogue the exposition isn’t too bad, and I like that the worldbuilding mostly focuses on the information that’s directly relevant to the story, while still throwing in just enough additional detail to make it seem like there’s a larger setting beyond the edge of the page. There are many, many fantasy authors who have been writing for much longer and who are much more acclaimed, yet who do far worse on all of these points.

And in the interest of fairness, I should point out that while I also didn’t like that book, the writing in Babel is a lot stronger than what I saw here.