Susan Barker (1) (1978–)

This book is a series of love stories woven together as an epistolary novel with Chinese history as the backdrop. But not the rise of a nation type of history, but the repetition of unbearable cruelty and loneliness and despair. It is also a political history of sorts. Old forms of slavery evolve into new forms of slavery. The kind of negative freedom we enjoy in the west -- freedom from shackles -- has modern equivalents. In how we treat sexual sub-cultures, in how we abuse children, and most certainly in how we enslave women to this day. The landscapes in this novel are smoky, polluted, damp, and mosquito-infested. The passion is intense. The betrayal unnerving. When you pick up this novel get ready for a roller coaster of passion and flat out terror. Even some great gallows humour.… (meer)

I almost put this down unfinished. I think I was feeling too tender for the considerable violence, even though it read to me more like Bluebeard, fairy-tale brutality. But then, I kept reading and for the second half could hardly put it down.

The writing is terrific, scenes and characters so vivid and visual. These were not characters I fell in love with but I did come to care about them and about how the book would end. The novel is different from my usual fictional fare, which I tend to read as commentary or for philosophical underpinnings. I like making, perceiving connections to my own time and my own experience of the world. At the point at which I almost abandoned the book, I would have said it was too unrelievedly bleak. But I think I finished it by reading it more like an adventure story—always wanting to know: What Happens Next??

The Incarnations is a most original and unexpected novel that Susan Barker realized well.… (meer)

Wang is a taxi driver in modern day Beijing who begins receiving mysterious and disturbing letters left in his cab. The letter purport to describe past lives of his, and to be written by someone whose soul has been connected to Wang's throughout these incarnations. Wang, in the meantime, struggles to make ends meet and to maintain his family, his wife and little girl, and to keep them safe from the letter writer, whom Wang assumes and fears is an unhinged stalker. His wife's job--she is a masseuse--disturbs him, but as she rightly points out, they need the money. We gradually have Wang's own background filled in, and then we have the letters to read, vivid and often harrowing descriptions of lives lived throughout the history of China, beginning with a small girl in a rural village in 637 A.D. and running up through the Cultural Revolution. All of these lives, including Wang's "current" life driving and walking the streets of Beijing, are described in admirable and convincing detail. Barker is English, but she lived in Beijing during her research for this novel. The many strands of this story come together well, although I found the ending unfortunately abrupt. The Incarnations is not always an easy reading experience, but I would rate it a very worthwhile one.… (meer)