Personally, I think it says something when the most exciting part of a book is the first section of the appendix. That probably isn’t a great sign. But to be fair to Bae Myung-Hoon, the appendix of Tower isn’t really your typical appendix. Instead, it takes characters from the six stories in the collection and delves into different parts of their lives to, I presume, continue to add colour and layers to this colourful and multi-layered set of linked short stories. The tales in Tower are connected by the setting in which they take place. Beanstalk is a skyscraper so tall that it has become its own nation state, and Tower tells us the intricacies of how that works and how it came to be. An exciting premise, right?
So why, then, am I highlighting part of the appendix as the standout moment? There are a couple of reasons. One is that it takes inspiration from a character called K, who is an author. The first part of the appendix pretends to be an outtake from one of K’s own works of fiction, and because of the change of style and pace in this section, it actually represents the first real moment of tension and intrigue in the book. It makes you want to read on. And that leads us to the other reason why it was my favourite section; I simply didn’t want to read on at any other moment.
Within its stories, Tower details a research project which leads to identifying that the major powerbroker in Beanstalk is a dog, takes us through a narrative of how the internet saved a downed fighter pilot, introduces a scared elephant that is trained to break up protest marches, and works its way through a two way narrative about an attempted terrorist plot and the person who is trying to stop it. And yet, despite all the potential for a riveting read, it never pulled me in as a reader.
Tower is clearly a work of political satire, and maybe I was missing some knowledge about Korean politics that would have made this work for me. But as it stands, it felt like an attempt to make political points, and an almost constant knowing wink from the author to the reader, prevented this from ever being a work in which pace and narrative were given the same attention as everything else.
Any Cop?: I think it is fair to say that some things may have been lost in translation with this one. And I don’t just mean in terms of the literal translation of language – I also feel that there may be some things so specific to the culture in which this book is set, that it doesn’t have quite the same impact when you are ignorant of those nuances. So I take my share of the blame there. But that doesn’t remove the often plodding way in which these stories are told, the almost complete absence of tension in stories that could and should be rife with them.
Fran Slater
Bookmunch 