Review: A Dream Wants Waking, by Lydia Kwa
A Dream Wants Waking by Lydia Kwa
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
A Dream Wants Waking is a speculative fiction novel set in the ancient city of Luoyang, China, ostensibly in the year 2219 CE. This is a complicated story, with a considerable cast of characters, and a mythology woven around genetic AI beings and modifications. There’s a lot going on here. You’d better stay sharp when reading. This isn’t a story written for bedtime somnolence.
The overarching narrative revolves around a chimeric fox/human spirit Yinhe, who time-jumps through eras to find her lost soulmate. Sounds relatively simple, but as I stated earlier, this is a complicated story. Kwa tosses around concepts and timelines like a cook gone berserk with seasonings, with the result being an overloaded dish of unidentifiable flavours. There are so many names, so many time-jumps, I felt very much as though I needed to create an Excel spreadsheet in order to keep things straight, and I like to think I’m a fairly sharp individual, capable of complicated analysis. Apparently not. Kwa lost me fairly quickly, to the point I had to keep skipping back several pages in order to again pick up the thread of the story.
I think part of that problem is not only the complexity of the plot, and the bombardment of character names and places, but of the lack of character development and world building. At this point, I still have no clear idea regarding Yinhe’s character, other than they’re utterly driven to find their lost love. None of the nuances of character traits, of internal thinking, of reaction are present. It’s all very expository.
The same holds true for the environment through which Yinhe travels. There’s no sense of weather, or quality of light, of smells and sounds, and what scant environmental detail is provided is clinical, stark, and, again, very expository so that there’s no sense of character involved in environment. It’s just all very pantomime, cardboard figures manipulated across a shadowy curtain.
Even the creatures of the whale-brain-become-AI, and the demon that slides in and out of possessions are, well, vague, insubstantial, a bit predictable.
So, this leaves me wondering why it is authors Larissa Lai (The Tiger Flu), and Jenny Heijun Wills (Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related: A Memoir) used phrases like: This is a fantasy that remembers with a purpose, and …a masterpiece of knowledge, dream and imagination. In fact, CBC listed Kwa’s novel among 74 works of fiction to read for fall 2023.
What am I missing? I keep feeling like I’ve had a Michelin Star chef’s presentation of a fragrance bubble as an amuse-bouche, and my palate is more attuned to antipasto, which then leads me to Kwa’s phraseology, which is, well, as insubstantial and ephemeral as that fragrance bubble. There is no elegant sentence structure, a lack of metaphor and literary device. It’s all rather stark writing until the last phrase, which is stunning in its beauty and simplicity.
And maybe that was the whole point of this difficult, complicated, sensory-deprived novel: that beauty lies in the destination, rather than the journey, and that concept, for me, is arresting and contrary to everything I know.
Despite my own antipathy to Kwa’s latest novel, I think you should read it for yourself. Art is subjective, and what one person praises, another disdains.