Reviewed by Charlene Van Buekenhout
Before opening The Swallows Uncaged, I didn’t know very much about Vietnam, let alone its history. I now have, in this novel, an extensive resource on the daily lives of Vietnamese people from early centuries through to modern times. If you are looking for an incredibly detailed account of day-to-day work (mostly the female kind) including cooking, cleaning, foraging, sleeping arrangements, and household hierarchies, then this is the book for you! Debut novelist Elizabeth McLean published an earlier version of this book, titled Imagining Vietnam – which was awarded the 2011 Impress Prize for New Writers – in the UK in 2013. Told in eight panels, like those of a Vietnamese screen, The Swallows Uncaged follows the history of the mostly ordinary people who fought in the wars, tended to the wounded, created the population and fed them.
Each panel tells the story of someone different; separated by centuries, they are only related by the commonality of the land and its history, rules, and culture. We begin with the first panel titled “The Black Stain.” This story follows a young girl name Lan (or Junior Sister, as she likes to call herself – these titles take some getting used to, especially when characters use them to refer to themselves in the third person) who has just come of age, and is excited to get her teeth blackened (as one is when hitting puberty). Teeth blackening is performed (over several days) around the time when children are ready to be married. The teeth are scoured with areca nut peels and charcoal, followed by mixtures of shellac, lemon (or lime) juice and rice liquor, and finally a mixture of powdered iron is applied to coat the teeth.
One day Confucius comes to Lan, and she asks if her Senior Sister (a widow) will ever be allowed to remarry. Confucius then tells her that she must defer to the men in her family and eventually her husband. He goes on to reiterate for her the rankings and duties of women in a family:
Care of the family and exemplary housekeeping come first; this is what women are born for. Neat and pleasant appearance is mandatory because it brings honour to the husband. Also, a gentle manner and polite language which show her respect of others. The strength of character is revealed in her obedience to her elders.
OK, Confucius, we get it, women are not as highly ranked as men, no need to hit us over the head with it, or maybe that’s the only way we’ll learn. Anyway, he ultimately tells the girl that the teacher in the area knows the rules and someone should ask him about it. A personal side note: If Confucius appeared to me and all he had to say was ‘ask your teacher,’ I’d feel a little unsatisfied.
But this is ancient Vietnam, and so it’s fine with Lan who is very excited to tell her family…
but she could not say a word because the evening meal was always eaten in silence, in deference to the exhausted paddy workers, and to the ancestors believed to be silently sharing the food with them. The family gulped their rice by the quivering light of the coconut lamps: two shells filled with groundnut oil, wicks stemming upwards. By the time the hushed ritual ended, dusk was thickening and sleep was calling.
Here we have only a small example of the type of information squeezed into the belly of the story. We learn why the evening meal is silent and what type of lamps they use and what they are made of and how the stems are wicks. This is interesting, and it does lay some groundwork for those who are Viet culture illiterate like me, but at times the explanations get in the way of the story rather than help my imagination. This is true of the overuse of similes interspersed generously throughout, like this one involved in a sexy romp: “…He rings her chest with his arms and spins her through the trees. They roll down the furrow like a watermelon…” It’s not that I’m a watermelon prude. It’s just that it didn’t help with the image for me. In fact I was completely taken out of the story by the fact of it being there.
Here is another example in the same panel. Our main character is describing a dream:
The elephant coils its trunk and swings her up like a tree trunk. She whirls in the air and hits the ground with a thump… Mother-in-law turns the giant beast around and it tramples the body over and over again till the corpse is as flat as a shrivelled cobra. Junior sister stirs her elephant around and it thumps over the woman’s head which cracks into a reddish pulp like a momordica melon…
Elephants are themselves used often in similes because of their size: “As big as an elephant”; “as loud as stampeding elephants”; “lay crumpled as though trampled by an elephant” and thus instead of supporting the imagery, the extra similes took clarity away from the recognizable metaphor in this dream sequence.
There is a silver lining, though: it’s not all explanations and similes. McLean is quite adept at creating vivid depictions of moments and we are treated to several gems throughout. The flood in the first panel is very immediate and effective. In the fourth panel, “Joseph and Mary,” a secondary character (Mai) fancies that the pale stranger she met might be a whale in human form who crossed the sea, a beautiful and simple image of this girl’s character. We get so much information from that small reverie. Miguel, from the same panel, has an experience with a woman who teaches him to eat his first Viet meal. This is simple, raw, and true to the moment and character.
Speaking of raw imagery, another great example is the account of the teeth blackening procedure (back in the first panel), which is horrific and I can still feel it. Here’s a taste: “Grandmother dipped a cluster of areca nut peels in the charcoal powder and began to scour Lan’s teeth with a steady circular motion, mauling every crack and crevice, the coarse grounds scraping Lan’s gums, which began to bleed.” I also have to mention the mighty description of a soldier riding the carcass of a charred pig down a hill to safety in the book’s final (and my favourite) panel, “Orange County, Canada.”
These parts were so vivid and real that it made the story they were a part of pale in comparison. Essentially this is what I was missing from The Swallows Uncaged as a whole. I didn’t feel a connection with the voice of the characters, nor did I think that the characters were fully developed in order for this to occur. They were like vessels carrying information and facts back and forth, rather than people with personalities, voices, bodies, lives. The book is so chockful of resource material and facts that there hardly seemed room for the characters to breathe, and ultimately reach through the words to touch the reader.
The arrival of outsiders like missionaries from Portugal, the French, feminism and finally plain old modernity come into play for the latter half of the panels, and the clash between the changing times, the culture and religion (that was so painstakingly set out for us in the first few panels) helps to inject the writing with some much needed pace. Here Mclean finds her stride through to a gratifying end.
Freehand | 320 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1554812646
‘The Swallows Uncaged’ by Elizabeth McLean
Book Reviews
Before opening The Swallows Uncaged, I didn’t know very much about Vietnam, let alone its history. I now have, in this novel, an extensive resource on the daily lives of Vietnamese people from early centuries through to modern times. If you are looking for an incredibly detailed account of day-to-day work (mostly the female kind) including cooking, cleaning, foraging, sleeping arrangements, and household hierarchies, then this is the book for you! Debut novelist Elizabeth McLean published an earlier version of this book, titled Imagining Vietnam – which was awarded the 2011 Impress Prize for New Writers – in the UK in 2013. Told in eight panels, like those of a Vietnamese screen, The Swallows Uncaged follows the history of the mostly ordinary people who fought in the wars, tended to the wounded, created the population and fed them.
Each panel tells the story of someone different; separated by centuries, they are only related by the commonality of the land and its history, rules, and culture. We begin with the first panel titled “The Black Stain.” This story follows a young girl name Lan (or Junior Sister, as she likes to call herself – these titles take some getting used to, especially when characters use them to refer to themselves in the third person) who has just come of age, and is excited to get her teeth blackened (as one is when hitting puberty). Teeth blackening is performed (over several days) around the time when children are ready to be married. The teeth are scoured with areca nut peels and charcoal, followed by mixtures of shellac, lemon (or lime) juice and rice liquor, and finally a mixture of powdered iron is applied to coat the teeth.
One day Confucius comes to Lan, and she asks if her Senior Sister (a widow) will ever be allowed to remarry. Confucius then tells her that she must defer to the men in her family and eventually her husband. He goes on to reiterate for her the rankings and duties of women in a family:
Care of the family and exemplary housekeeping come first; this is what women are born for. Neat and pleasant appearance is mandatory because it brings honour to the husband. Also, a gentle manner and polite language which show her respect of others. The strength of character is revealed in her obedience to her elders.
OK, Confucius, we get it, women are not as highly ranked as men, no need to hit us over the head with it, or maybe that’s the only way we’ll learn. Anyway, he ultimately tells the girl that the teacher in the area knows the rules and someone should ask him about it. A personal side note: If Confucius appeared to me and all he had to say was ‘ask your teacher,’ I’d feel a little unsatisfied.
But this is ancient Vietnam, and so it’s fine with Lan who is very excited to tell her family…
but she could not say a word because the evening meal was always eaten in silence, in deference to the exhausted paddy workers, and to the ancestors believed to be silently sharing the food with them. The family gulped their rice by the quivering light of the coconut lamps: two shells filled with groundnut oil, wicks stemming upwards. By the time the hushed ritual ended, dusk was thickening and sleep was calling.
Here we have only a small example of the type of information squeezed into the belly of the story. We learn why the evening meal is silent and what type of lamps they use and what they are made of and how the stems are wicks. This is interesting, and it does lay some groundwork for those who are Viet culture illiterate like me, but at times the explanations get in the way of the story rather than help my imagination. This is true of the overuse of similes interspersed generously throughout, like this one involved in a sexy romp: “…He rings her chest with his arms and spins her through the trees. They roll down the furrow like a watermelon…” It’s not that I’m a watermelon prude. It’s just that it didn’t help with the image for me. In fact I was completely taken out of the story by the fact of it being there.
Here is another example in the same panel. Our main character is describing a dream:
The elephant coils its trunk and swings her up like a tree trunk. She whirls in the air and hits the ground with a thump… Mother-in-law turns the giant beast around and it tramples the body over and over again till the corpse is as flat as a shrivelled cobra. Junior sister stirs her elephant around and it thumps over the woman’s head which cracks into a reddish pulp like a momordica melon…
Elephants are themselves used often in similes because of their size: “As big as an elephant”; “as loud as stampeding elephants”; “lay crumpled as though trampled by an elephant” and thus instead of supporting the imagery, the extra similes took clarity away from the recognizable metaphor in this dream sequence.
There is a silver lining, though: it’s not all explanations and similes. McLean is quite adept at creating vivid depictions of moments and we are treated to several gems throughout. The flood in the first panel is very immediate and effective. In the fourth panel, “Joseph and Mary,” a secondary character (Mai) fancies that the pale stranger she met might be a whale in human form who crossed the sea, a beautiful and simple image of this girl’s character. We get so much information from that small reverie. Miguel, from the same panel, has an experience with a woman who teaches him to eat his first Viet meal. This is simple, raw, and true to the moment and character.
Speaking of raw imagery, another great example is the account of the teeth blackening procedure (back in the first panel), which is horrific and I can still feel it. Here’s a taste: “Grandmother dipped a cluster of areca nut peels in the charcoal powder and began to scour Lan’s teeth with a steady circular motion, mauling every crack and crevice, the coarse grounds scraping Lan’s gums, which began to bleed.” I also have to mention the mighty description of a soldier riding the carcass of a charred pig down a hill to safety in the book’s final (and my favourite) panel, “Orange County, Canada.”
These parts were so vivid and real that it made the story they were a part of pale in comparison. Essentially this is what I was missing from The Swallows Uncaged as a whole. I didn’t feel a connection with the voice of the characters, nor did I think that the characters were fully developed in order for this to occur. They were like vessels carrying information and facts back and forth, rather than people with personalities, voices, bodies, lives. The book is so chockful of resource material and facts that there hardly seemed room for the characters to breathe, and ultimately reach through the words to touch the reader.
The arrival of outsiders like missionaries from Portugal, the French, feminism and finally plain old modernity come into play for the latter half of the panels, and the clash between the changing times, the culture and religion (that was so painstakingly set out for us in the first few panels) helps to inject the writing with some much needed pace. Here Mclean finds her stride through to a gratifying end.
Freehand | 320 pages | $21.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1554812646