Fiction Reviews
Daughter of Calamity
(2024) Rosalie M. Lin, Tor, £18.99, hrdbk, 343pp, ISBN 978-1-035-01126-1
Jingwen is a dancer, to be found of a Friday night at the Paramount, the club with ‘the richest foreign guests and gaudiest drama’ (p. 5) in 1930s Shanghai. She also ferries bones across the city, to be ground up and shipped overseas as ‘dragon powder’ – a side-product of her grandmother’s practice of replacing the arms of local gangsters with replicas made of silver, melted down from their swords. For Jingwen this is all of a piece with the transactional to-and-fro of Shanghai life but she is determined not to be drawn into that world and become her grandmother’s apprentice. So, when the door opens to an easier livelihood, in the form of a new dance partner, one Dr. Bailey Thompson, she promptly and gladly steps through. And when she discovers that Dr. Thompson has acquired the Paramount and has determined that she will be the leading lady in a show fusing modern jazz with Chinese folk, Jingwen believes that she is no longer a mere puppet cabaret girl but someone who can pull some strings on her own behalf.
However, all such opportunities come at a cost. As the lead, Jingwen has to play the part of the Feral Goddess, known as Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, to the Buddhists but who is also Xiwangmu, the Mother of Calamity, for the Taoists. And as our feisty and determined hero soon discovers, taking on the form of the god brings with it responsibilities and consequences, along with the power. In addition, her benefactor, the not-so-good doctor, is himself seeking fresh business opportunities, which he thinks he’s found in the form of a rare hallucinogenic fungus from the mountains. Thompson sees in this the possibility to reshape Shanghai into ‘a place to experience the intoxication of shamanic magic’ (p. 132), with Jingwen at the forefront of this new endeavour. However, things take an even darker turn when one by one, her fellow dancers are suddenly and mysteriously mutilated, some losing their lips, others their beautiful eyes.
With this horrific turn of events, Jingwen resolves to help her friends and discover what is really going on, aided and abetted by Nalan Zikai, a shaman and martial artist from Inner Mongolia. Zikai, however, brings complications of his own when he reveals that he is determined to kill the leader of the gang that Jingwen’s grandmother serves and which has protected her all this time. With her loyalties multiply divided, much like the city itself with its foreign ‘concessions’, Jingwen must dance her way through these turbulent circumstances and find her place in the new world that Shanghai is becoming.
That Rosalie Lin is able to keep these assorted fragile plates spinning to a satisfying conclusion is a real testimony to her skill as a writer. Balancing gods and cabaret girls, shamans and gangsters, across diverse but intersecting cultures, is a delicate and difficult task and for it to be achieved so apparently effortlessly is remarkable for a debut novel. Richly evocative in its descriptions, not only of the characters but also, crucially, of the city itself, in all its myriad guises, this, like the delicious food mentioned throughout, is a book to be savoured.
Steven French
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