A gut-punch in book form.
A while ago, Molly Templeton wrote a piece at Reactor about not needing to understand everything in a book that I vibed with so very hard - I am quite a "roll with it" reader in many ways, and it is lovely to have someone put good words around an experience you've had. It came back to me as I was reading Red Sword, the new novel from Bora Chung, because not only is it a story without a lot of handholds to find while reading, but is in fact one where the confusion is emphatically part of the point. It is a story that languishes in that feeling of ignorance, of lostness, and does something fantastic with it.
The story begins with ignorance - the protagonist is on an alien world, at a loss about most of the details, knowing only that she has been brought there by an imperial power who have violently coerced her into this place to fight. What then proceeds for a large chunk of the novel is action absolutely devoid of context. Things... happen. The protagonist endures and experiences. We the reader experience alongside her. We have just as little context as she does, must endure the bafflement along with her. The events that she experiences and endures are confusing, traumatic, violent and often horrible. The novel is full of sequences of fighting, of death. People - many of whom the protagonist knows by description rather than name - are forced to fight an overwhelmingly superior enemy without guns, and die horribly in the act of it, beginning in the first few pages with an unnamed man the protagonist has come to love during their mutual imprisonment on the ship that brought them to this planet to fight.
Her experience then is shaped not by understanding but by inexplicable bloodshed and death. For a cause she doesn't know, let alone support, in a place she doesn't know, with rules she doesn't know. But she keeps being pushed back into these violent encounters, suffering at the hands of the imperials who brought her here as well as the mysterious white aliens they fight.
Already, I think it's clear this sounds like a grim story. It is. It's apparently inspired by the stories of Korean soldiers who were sent to fight in Russia for the Qing Dynasty, and that sense of powerlessness, of being dragged into an outside conflict, comes through at every turn. But it's not just the events and the thematic resonances of this that reinforce it. It's the language.
This is a translated novel, so it's never going to be clear (particularly to me, who speaks no Korean), the extent to which the object that comes into my hands owes its phrasing to Bora Chung or to the translator, Anton Hur. But whatever portions they poured in to the alchemical pot that made this worked perfectly, and particularly in one specific way: the sparseness of the prose. Now I am normally a fan of ornate. Give me something deliciously overwritten and I will, like as not, go mad for it. But Red Sword goes hard in the opposite direction, and is just as brutally impactful for it as something embracing adjectival rococo. To the extent that... I don't even quite understand how it's doing it. How using simple sentences, direct statements, with flat tonality, somehow turns into an emotional gutpunch. There are brief moments that make sense - after a paragraph of text, the contrasting bluntness of a single, brief sentence character death obviously has the benefit of contrast. But it's not just those individual moments. It's the whole thing. All of it is in this almost detached, distant, plain language. And yet it manages to be some of the most emotionally affecting.
To give a specific example, there's a long section in the middle of the book, where the protagonist is thrown from violent situation to violent situation on a foggy field of battle. She doesn't know where she's going or what's going on, and she is simply trying to survive situation by situation. It culminates with a scene of her smashing a weapon into the body of an imperial soldier over and over and over and over again, before cutting to a section break, and then opening the next with her being distracted from almost a reverie by a female scream.
I put the book down after reading that section, hit with a sudden certainty that what I just read was a vivid depiction of someone in shock.
That's what Chung and Hur's prose does here - it situates you emphatically in this experience of living moment to moment, contextless and confused, and by doing so in such blunt terms, hammers home the reality of that experience. Like the protagonist, you are completely at sea in the horror of it all. Her emotions echo out to the reader through this sympathetic experience. The detachment isn't detachment; it's indicative of the real emotional toll being exacted by the horrors she faces. And it is so powerfully done, it cannot be quickly consumed. For all its simplicity, it is prose you need to sit with and digest. I can't quite figure out how its doing what it's doing, but I can absolutely revel in the experience of it.
As the story goes on, some context does leak in. There is some sense of clarity and closure by the final part of the story, but even then, that feeling of being lost never truly ebbs. The bones of the context are there, but we don't have the fleshing out of exposition that would be my expectation of the usual speculative novel. There's no grand speech laying out motive. Only snippets, and even they form a small part of a larger picture unseen, only speculated. But we don't need to have the architects of all this misery come to speak their peace. We see someone experiencing its effects. What does the context matter in the face of the facts? What do the explanations matter in the face of the suffering?
A lot of this, I think, also comes down to trust. Chung lays actions out simply and clearly, with short snippets of dialogue, and mostly expects the reader to infer meaning from how they interact, how those pieces of dialogue or the rare intrusions of meta interact with one another, or to infer that meaning is, at this point, unattainable. Explanations come predominantly at the granular level - how the protagonist got out of the river, how she broke her sword, how she shot the gun. Overarching plot theorising? Not so much. But these moments piece together into a whole, and that whole shows us those effects. We see what this empire is by what it does.
And so I think this is a novel that makes an art out of incomplete understanding. It would be a worse book if the underpinnings were explained at any point, and especially the start, because it would rob us of the chance to ride along with the protagonist and be lost with her, to flow with the story as she flows with it, in shared confusion. It is that shared experience that absolutely makes the story what it is, and allows for some incredibly powerful moments. I do not think I have read scenes of violence in a story - especially as someone who generally finds battle scenes and extended fights tedious - that have affected me quite so strongly, and I think it is precisely because I have to experience them situated in the moment with the character, rather than trying to fit them into a broader context, or seeing them as a moving part in a puzzle, a set piece hurdle to traverse. They're not. The violence is, the experience of that violence, is the point. The protagonist's experience is the point. When the story reaches its conclusion, a number of questions open up about personhood, about who gets to be real, and about the disposability of human life in the endless grind of the imperial machine. Those questions are better served by the time spent paying attention to the material consequences of those imperial decisions.
Red Sword is deceptively simple. Its simplicity is its power; its contextlessness is the point. By removing all the guardrails, it forces the reader to confront the brutality of the experiences of its protagonist, and reckon with them purely as they are, before coming to any kind of broader conclusions about the wider politics at play. The human first. The real, lived moment first. The consequences first. Only then context, a little, but even that ultimately serves that larger section of the text. Chung has turned confusion into an emotional weapon, and drives it home with every brief, brutal sentence. I may not have always understood it all, but I felt it.
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The Math
Highlights:
- some of the best writing of violence I've come across in a book
- vivid, clipped prose that shocks you into emotions
- immersive perspective
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10
Reference: Bora Chung, Red Sword, [Honford Star, 2025]. Translator: Anton Hur.
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
