The Good Earth

Title: The Good Earth
Author: Pearl S. Buck
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2016 (First published 1931)
ISBN: 9781471151873
Pages: 357

This is not actually a review as I have a few points to note regarding this book which is highly subjective and not of much use to anyone else. But I wanted to record it somewhere before the neurons which control my memory go dysfunctional or dead. So much for reading this book for the umpteenth time, but the first since I started this review series. In fact, I enjoyed reading four books a number of times in my childhood. Buying new books on a regular basis was not an option for the son of a bank clerk and a factory shop-floor worker. Access to a public library was unmanageable in our little hamlet. Reading a good book of which you possessed a copy again and again was the only option to pass time in an era before television or internet. The four books were, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Good Earth, Sherlock Holmes and Children's Mahabharata, all translated to Malayalam. That's how this book with its Malayalam title of 'Nalla Bhoomi' came into my hands for the first time, around 45 years ago. I still remember its green and brown cover with the image of a Chinese dragon on it. That's how this book was an inseparable companion in my reading life and decided to make it a part of this series. Pearl S. Buck was an American writer and humanitarian. This book won her Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and she won the Nobel Prize in Literature 'for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China'. She stayed for a long time in China as the daughter of her missionary parents and she herself worked as a missionary before resigning the position.

This novel revolves around a Chinese peasant named Wang Lung who pervades it from its very first line which starts with 'It was Wang Lung's marriage day' and till the last line of the book which runs 'But over the old man's [Wang Lung] head they looked at each other and smiled'. It tells the story of Wang who led his family through very harsh times and labouring hard on the field. The sordid details of being poor in rural China is brought out in vivid detail. Eventually, he becomes rich and takes to liquor and women. However, he does not lose direction as he is strongly anchored to land, but his sons do not experience that moderating influence. The book ends with his sons planning to sell land for their extravagance by giving false assurances to their father who admonishes them for even considering selling of land. The novel hints that the family was on the road to collapse with sale of land. It clearly portrays the prime position of land in Wang's life and hence in the Chinese countryside. He farmed it, built his home on it and even ate the sand when famine struck. Wang and his family had to flee to the south of the country at that time and he pulled rickshaw in the big city while his wife and children begged on the streets. Even in this difficult period, the thought of his land waiting for him at home, rich with spring rains and this thought filled him with the desire to live. Wang Lung did not beg and was unwilling to touch another's money, but the riot following a war in the city forced him to take a rich man's personal savings as ransom. This was only to help him return to his land, where he worked so assiduously on the field when he returned that he begrudged even the hours he must spend in the house for food and sleep. When he grew too weary in the day, he lied down in a furrow and slept with the warmth of his own land against his flesh. Dead and alive, the family rested on the land.

The writing style in the book is often described as biblical or reminiscent of ancient epics. It reflects the influence of Chinese oral traditions. You feel this only when you read the original in English. One reason may be that the author belonged to the missionary class and must be having the Bible as her foundational reading material. Moreover, she lived in China and was fluent in the language. Chinese story tellers used simple words and a straightforward style to create vivid, fast-moving stories. The somewhat unusual word order in the book mimics the structure of spoken Chinese. The novel describes the intense trauma, poverty and profound changes with a calm, objective and solemn voice. It depicts the incessant series of floods, draught and pestilence that mar the life of a peasant. Each of them led to starvation and people sold their girl-children as slaves to gain a few pieces of money. China's modern craze for dams and flood-control measures are not entirely unjustified, looking at the situation described in this book. Migration to the city was the only option where men worked at this and that for a few pence and the women and children stole and begged. It was a time when Chinese society began to get engaged with foreigners who stayed with them as businessmen or missionaries. They handsomely tipped rickshaw pullers and beggars, but the locals did not feel that they dropped silver because of any goodness of heart but rather because of ignorance and not knowing that 'copper is more correct to give to beggars than silver'. Since Buck had stayed in China for a long time, she must have been sharing her own experience.

Readers get a rich experience in assessing the quirks and flaws in the character of Wang Lung. Though he was poor, he steadfastly saved small sums to purchase land from the House of Hwang, an aristocratic family nearby, who were disintegrating because in the previous generation the lords ceased to see the land and took the money their agents gave them and spent it carelessly like water. Wang assesses that the strength of the land was gone from them and bit by bit the land had begun to go. One or two decades later, the same story was beginning to unfold in Wang's family as well. Wang secretly admired the ways of the rich and copied them when he himself became rich. He left his own home and occupied the palatial house of Hwang where he had once stood as a supplicant and had taken a slave girl of the family as his wife. The girl O-lan, Wang's wife, is a forceful character in the book who attracts the readers' sympathies. Her parents had sold her as a slave in the time of famine. She was a slave to Wang as well. She never talked back to him and did not even smile, but did all the work uncomplainingly and bore him children. She was not beautiful and Wang forgot to observe this, till he was rich. When he became pecunious, he looked at O-lan as a man looks at a woman and found that she was not pretty, and she became afraid of him from that day on. He then took a concubine and settled her in a part of his house. The character of O-lan fills the readers with a tinge of sadness that only a great work of literature can achieve.

Pearl Buck's daughter, Carol, suffered from a rare form of disease called phenylketonuria (PKU) which is an inherited metabolic disorder that causes severe, irreversible intellectual disability if untreated. Carol's condition was not diagnosed until many years after her birth, and she was eventually placed in an institution. Buck chronicled her experiences in the 1950 book 'The Child Who Never Grew'. It is said that Buck turned to writing to save enough to get the child admitted in a decent institution. Carol spent her life there from age 9 till her death at age 72. There is a biographical element in Wang Lung's eldest daughter who was dumb. She is always referred to as the 'poor fool' who smiled and twisted a cloth endlessly. She never spoke nor did those things which were right for her age. She always smiled her baby smile when she caught her father's glance. Wang assigns a trusted maid to poison her after his passing away. This book presents life in Chinese villages in a heart-touching style and it is said that this was instrumental in affecting the American mindset towards China. The book is very absorbing and enjoyable. The simple and personal nature of religious worship is elaborated in many places. The gods shared the fortunes of their worshippers. If the climate was good and harvests are fine, they would get new clothes, incense sticks and other offerings. During famines, they were neglected and left to rot in the open temples exposed to rain and shine.

The book is most highly recommended.

Rating: 5 Star