Get ready for a dark family saga: a review of A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing
A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a masterpiece, though you might not realize it before you get past the first hundred pages.
Things start off slow and dull for the first few chapters as you follow Qianze and her father Weihong. Neither are easy to connect to as characters. At first, Qianze's mother ended up being the only person who really snagged my attention. (She goes from being an impoverished Chinese immigrant and a single mother pretending to be widowed to being a stereotypical middle class lady who attends yoga classes, forms book clubs, is curious about Buddhism, tries Mediterranean diets, and gossips about her daughter. I desperately wanted to know more about this flawed figure whose worry over her daughter's unhappiness causes her to think it might somehow be helpful to warn Qianze that being moody means she's going to reincarnate as a worm.)
It's not that Qianze and Weihong don't have depth of their own. They do, but they lack unique perspectives and voices. Their observations, interactions, reactions, and behaviors taught me less about who they are and more about how technically gifted the author is at setting tone and atmosphere. The writing is beautiful, but I wasn't emotionally invested, at least not at first. The one good thing about the early chapters is the way fantastical elements are used to explore how unsettling it is to care for an aging parent who has memory loss.
The premise is that after years of estrangement, Weihong has suddenly decided to reacquaint himself with his daughter. He's aged and perhaps ill, and Qianze is not in a place -- emotionally or financially -- to take him in, but it seems like he has nowhere else to go. He also seems to have some sort of secret that he's struggling to get out. Qianze has to decide if she even wants to learn his secret or if she has more important problems to deal with. If that premise sounds interesting but slow, you'd be right. A lot depends on whether the characters are compelling, and at first, they might not be.
Fortunately, about a third of the way through, we get a new perspective character named Ming, and she brings everything together. She grows up in rural Manchuria during World War II, and in this setting, the author's enthralling prose gets a chance to shine. I was completely swept off my feet as the story's spellbinding imagery transported me to another time and place. Ming is also easy to root for, and she has a propulsive (if very dark) story, so the plot and pacing pick up here.
Some of Weihong's behaviors also get an explanation around this time, making him a more layered character. His backstory is heartbreaking, and if I wasn't emotionally invested in him as an adult, I certainly got emotional when I learned more about his past. Qianze's story similarly gets going after a hundred pages. Her character grew on me as I got more glimpses into her rage, her fears, and the way she's tried to curate her image. It turns out that her father's return causes that image to shatter, dredging up all sorts of contradictory feelings, which somewhat justifies her painfully stunted reactions in the first few chapters. It would have been nice to have this context earlier. However, even though the recontextualizing comes late, it still helped me to forgive how slow the story is at the start.
By the time the book reaches its powerful and poignant climax, I had chills. As more mysteries are uncovered, the novel reveals itself to be a stunning and devastating depiction of the different relationships people have with each other, themselves, their histories, and their homes. It's about the myths we tell ourselves and each other to survive and the things people are capable of doing when survival is on the line. It's about what gets preserved, repressed, distorted, altered, or lost through various collective and personal traumas. I highly recommend it to people who like multiple timelines, Chinese history, messy family sagas, books about immigration, and magical realism that leans towards horror.