Beneath A Thousand Skies

Hello,

Continuing with the novella reviews for this week, with a look at Linghun by Ai Jiang which is one of those books that sits long past the reading.

Linghun was an impulse read, I was browsing for something short to read and something a little different. I’m still not sure what caught my attention about this one, but I’m glad that I did, because even now weeks later I find myself gnawing at this book.

A haunting gothic novella that is a mediation on death and grief, and that delicate, tangled battleground that grief creates between the boundaries of life and death. From the beginning it’s a fascinating premise to have families moving to HOME, a place full of ghosts both living and dead, where those who are mourning can try and get a hopefully haunted house where they can tempt the ghosts of their lost ones back to them.  Very much playing into the idea that it is our memories, and habits associated with our lost ones that can keep them alive and anchored with us, and we see that used as both a lure and a physical anchor to those ghosts that do return – through favourite meals and stories and connection.

The sheer number of people who have made Home their place, even without a roof or house of their own, speaks to the fact that grief is never fully alone. Jiang really captures that as well with the varied depictions of grief, from Wenqi who grieves but does not cling to the ghost in the same way, to a wife chasing the ghost of an ideal, to a son mourning not just the death of a sibling but of parents lost to grief, of a future bound to that grief. But, also to the idea that grief is not bound just to the loss of a person, but to place, and culture and language, or more intimately to loss of self.

Is this clinging to grief and ghosts healthy? Absolutely not, and we see the physical and emotional impacts of that; as well as seeing how far people lost to grief are willing to go to try and get the chance to see those ghosts, even to the extent where loss begets loss. That if you cling to much to grief and the past, you may something or someone that is still there.

There were a few elements that didn’t work quite as well for me. One was that the ending in someway felt a little rushed, and while it was a powerful conclusion in some ways, it just felt like it needed a bit more to really hit that satisfying point. The second was I wanted to know more about Tania the real estate agent, and the role she plays in this world within a world.

Another element that when I read it sat wrong was about the school curriculum and school being out of date, but in retrospect, I feel that’s more important that it seems in the middle for two reasons; on the first, if the school was always moving forward with the world beyond Home then it would drag people out of this moment where they are caught in, the passage of time would be forced to shift and that would impact the entire system. The other thought I had came in retrospect from how Home became what it was, this town of haunted houses, and lingering ghosts – had to have fallen out of time itself, and I might be wrong, but with how much of a role a school can play in a place, perhaps the fact it is stuck out of time is a subtle nod to how Home fell into the place it is.

Linghun is not the easiest of reads for several reasons, despite its short length and I can definitely see that it won’t be for everyone. However, I also feel like it shouldn’t be easy. That its weight needs to be felt and sat with for a time, and like I said this one has stayed on my mind since reading. I feel it could have done with a bit more breathing space, but at the same time Jiang has created a novella that seeps into the parts of loss and grief we don’t always want to confront but need to be seen. A powerful read, not perfect, but one that will stay a while yet I think.