Kaan’s spider-silken debut demands a second reading
Narrative doesn’t follow format of a typical novel, and the plot hinges on the book’s final page
This book is a rare thing. Despite the fact that it’s about the Second World War — why do we still go to this war for our drama and tales of moral certainties and ambiguities? — The Water Beetles has an ending that throws everything that’s happened before into a new light, though “light” here is not at all the right word.
I’ve reviewed hundreds of books and read, probably, thousands, and I can think of two others that have managed this high-wire act of literary derring-do.
Most writers — never mind first-time novelists, as 48-year-old Winnipegger Michael Kaan is — worry to the point of fingernaillessness about their readers getting past the first page, the first paragraph, the first sentence. To plot and then construct a book that only really reveals how good it is in its final page is as brave, and as reckless, as anything Philippe Petit ever did.
Now, don’t go skipping to the end to see for yourself. Like the famous ending of James Joyce’s Ulysses, it won’t mean much out of context.
What makes this all the more remarkable is that this is not a narrative in the way one expects a novel to be. It is not in any way experimental. All the characters stay who they were, none of them turns their head to wink at you as you read, and the world described is in every particular the world we also live in. But one expects, in a non-experimental work of fiction, for there to be an arc, that rise and fall of action and fortunes, the evolution of a character from where she starts to where she ends, with some catharsis and discoveries along the way.
There’s a lot of movement in The Water Beetles, a story of a wealthy Hong Kong boy whose world is interrupted by the Japanese invasion. And a lot of its power depends on suspense, and though the mechanisms work about as differently from a crime novel as is literarily possible, it’s best we not say too much about our protagonist, Chung-Man, his slightly older brother, Leuk, and what happens to his little sister, Wei-Ming, his sister-in-law, Yee-Lin, or his mother. And though the book opens with beetles, by the time you realize why the book is named after them, you may well have forgotten that you were wondering.
I only got it, inasmuch as something so spider-silken can be got, when I, using an old reviewer’s trick, started reading the book from the beginning immediately after finishing it. It’s often a helpful thing to do — the writer did it, after all, probably a couple of dozen times — and finding the ending in the beginning and vice versa is often fun and sometimes profitable. In The Water Beetles, it’s practically a necessity.
So, read it, then read it again. Michael Kaan’s written a good book.