What an unusual book. It won a Pulitzer and I believe its author also won a Nobel prize for Literature and this book is supposedly her greatest work.

Orwell categorised a group of books that he called ‘Good bad books’ and for me, this book might be in that category. Defined as

the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished

I think it might fit. The writing is not great, there isn’t really a story but it is a moral tale, told in the present tense 3rd person giving it that slightly distanced, traditional tale feel.

Wang Lung is a peasant farmer who through sheer hard work is able to buy more land, make more money and become gentrified but the moral of the story is that as soon as he and his family start to step back from the land, they fall into fighting, corruption and general decline.

Set in China, it also shows how the farmers and food production is totally dependent on the weather and how they teeter on the edge of calamity every year if the rains fail and the sun becomes too strong or too much rain falls. Then we see the family leave the land and move south to Nanking and live like rats under mats stealing, scavenging and working for food. It is survival but constantly, he is drawn back to the land in memory and then in person.

I wondered whether the book would be criticised for its stereotyping of the Chinese even though Buck lived for most of her first forty years in China. They would of course have been white people who earned much more money, had servants and lived a very different life to Wang Lung but it doesn’t mean that Buck didn’t observe events.

We get female infanticide, binding of feet, female children called slaves and sold to other families, the ruin caused by opium and the working of the land with hoes and ox. But we also have the family in transition because Wang Lung sends his boy children off to the south to be educated in schools and so they return home with very different expectations about life and how they want to live. Wang Lung has made much money from farming and moves to the large house that used to belong to the Hwang family until their decline. There also comes new clothing made of more expensive cloth and foods that would not have been available to them when poorer and there is Wang Lung’s pigtail which would not have been worn in the cities.

Money also meant that Wang Lung could take a second wife and he chose a prostitute who lay around in bed all day, eating only the best foods and with a woman to take care of her. Wang Lung’s first wife was deemed ugly because her feet had not been bound and so were big. But this was a woman who bore him sons and then was up the next day working in the fields. She cooked for the family, looked after his aging father and was the one who kept her head and knew what to do when they were destitute and living under mats in Nanking. Reading the book ninety years after first being published, it is not a book that values the place of women but then I suppose, in those days, they weren’t.

I can not deny that if you have land, you always have a chance to grow your own food and even now, this might be seen as a good thing having followed the food scares after Brexit and the pandemic and thinking ahead to the foods that America want to trade with us. The idea of a trophy wife still exists and what happens to the wife who helped generate the wealth and is then discarded and there is the role of children who have grown up with wealth and who don’t remember what it felt like to be very poor.

The relevances to our lives today do make this book a classic but it is a funny little book.