Bound for glory

FOR her new novel, “Peony in Love,” Lisa See mines an intriguing vein of Chinese history. When the opera “The Peony Pavilion” was written in 1598, the story fascinated and shocked on many levels. It was openly sensual, even sexual, but more than that, it introduced a new kind of heroine, the spirited Liniang. Contrary to the mores surrounding the life of women, she follows her heart in matters of love and dies as a result -- and then is magically resurrected.

History and the abundant writings by women of the time tell us that some young girls were so taken with Liniang’s radical choice that they became “lovesick maidens,” so obsessed with the opera and the personal freedom it preached that they starved themselves rather than confront arranged marriages and the limitations of being wives and daughters-in-law. In a society in which feelings, especially women’s, were as restricted as their foot-bound movement, these girls wrested control in the only way they knew. Weaving fact and fiction into a dense romantic tapestry of time and place as she meditates on the meaning of love, the necessity of self-expression and the influence of art, See tells the story of one such maiden, Peony, and her desperate bid for identity.

At 16, Peony sees the opera for the first time (albeit from behind a lattice screen where women are hidden from male view) when her father stages it at her lavish palace home. Overcome by the emotional story, she wanders to the gardens, where she encounters a young man similarly enraptured by the opera. They exchange heated notions of love and quickly fall for each other. But their relationship is doomed because their marriages to others have long since been arranged. Despairing of her loveless future and filled with opera-inspired passion -- not to mention her own burgeoning desire to have her voice heard -- Peony begins to write furiously about her response to the opera. In her mania, she loses all interest in everything, including eating, and starves herself to death.

With a sure and surprising hand, See resolves this drama not by book’s end but a third of the way into the story. The novel’s second section begins: “I died in the seventh hour on the seventh day of the twelfth month in the third year of Emperor Kangxi’s reign.” It’s a high-wire move, and See succeeds in getting her readers to cross over into the afterlife. She illuminates for us the complex and rule-bound world of the dead as knowledgably as she depicts the intricacies of Chinese society. The culture of that time considered the dead to be wholly invested with emotions, complicated afterlives and the ability to affect the living: See’s novel, then, can be considered a ghost story, but it doesn’t carry the burden of credibility these stories usually do. Custom dictates that for a soul to become an ancestor (and, therefore, venerated for generations to come), the dead must have their ancestor tablet -- an artifact akin to a gravestone -- “dotted,” or marked with ink by living relatives. Overwhelmed by grief, neither Peony’s tradition-bound mother nor indulgent father remember to do this, and so Peony becomes a “hungry ghost” destined to wander in the realm of the living, unseen and unworshipped.

In death, Peony sees more of life than she would have as a cloistered wife, and in doing so, her understanding of her country’s tormented history and the nature of love matures. Still besotted with her young man, Peony realizes that the only way her voice, and her feelings of unbounded love, can finally be heard is through his subsequent wives. The book’s plot revolves around the ghost of Peony as she infiltrates these women’s lives to make them understand the opera and the “deep love” it preaches. Once they do so, she hopes, the young man will dot her tablet, which is the rite that will allow him to take Peony as his “ghost wife” -- an act that will release her from her wandering.

It’s a complicated setup, and See’s first-person narrative, which captures Peony’s youth and romantic naivete, occasionally becomes cumbersome as she loads it with the required exposition. More than in See’s last novel, “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” the high melodrama can sometimes feel overwrought, and the pleasures of the book lean toward an intellectual appreciation of the culture so richly described. See is excellent and moving, however, when limning the subtle effects of societal proscription -- the way Peony realizes that she is “trapped like good-luck crickets in bamboo-and-lacquer cages,” or when she recognizes that “hidden behind the activities of embroidery, calligraphy, and reading poetry” is “the shadow darkness of the women who lived in the Chen Family Villa.”

Still, there is a curious distancing effect caused by the characters’ sometimes-hyperbolic expression of love and loss, and we are often told about emotional vicissitudes rather than made to feel them, as when the ghost Peony exults when her beloved finally reads her words and hears her true voice:

“I knew he’d finally heard me,” she says. “Gratification at last. Euphoria, elation, ecstasy.” See seems to be matching the tone of her narrative to the tone of the opera, and to the poetry of the day that inspired it.

The opera, although fatal to Peony, also releases her to explore a world and emotions that are unavailable to her in her proscribed life.

See seems to be asking us to take this same, if less injurious, journey with her and open our hearts to a work that gives almost theatrical expression to a full range of passions.