Review: The Poppy War, by R. F. Kuang

Review: The Poppy War, by R. F. Kuang

by Rich Horton

The Poppy War was R. F. Kuang's first novel, from 2018. It was very successful, winning the Compton F. Crook Award for Best SF/F First Novel, and being shortlisted for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards. Kuang won the Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 2020. This novel and its two sequels are transparently set in a version of China, in a period roughly corresponding to 1930-1950. I am told that the main character is based on Mao Zedong, though I was not really able to recognize this in The Poppy War. (I am sure this becomes clearer in the sequels, The Dragon Republic and The Burning God.) 

The main viewpoint character is Rin, a war orphan living in Tikany, in a remote province of the Nikan Empire. She is essentially a slave of her adoptive parents, the Fangs, who are dealers in opium. But she decides to study for the exam -- in which a high finish will allow her to attend the university. Her goal is the academy in the capitol city, Sinegard, for which tuition is free -- and which trains students to be officers in the Empress's army. 

Naturally, Rin succeeds, and makes her way to Sinegard. There she struggles to fit in -- she is looked down on as a lower class provincial -- most of the other students are from wealthy aristocratic families. She does make one good friend -- Kitai, a brilliant student but less of a fighter. And she makes an enemy: Nezha, a handsome boy from a very highly placed family, and a legitimately talented martial artist. Rin proves an excellent student, of course, and she also attracts the attention of the enigmatic Jiang, the master of Lore. It turns out that Jiang's teachings concern learning to make contact with the Pantheon of gods -- who can grant "shamans" great power, at a great cost. And Rin also encounters Jiang's previous student (he takes students rarely) -- Altan Tensen, a recent graduate, who has become famous as perhaps the greatest martial artist the academy has seen in a long time. Tensen is a Speerly -- the last Speerly (or is he?), the only survivor of the brutal massacre of the inhabitants of that island during the previous Poppy War against Mugen. 

If the above has the flavor of cliché -- well, it really is a very familiar story: brilliant poor child comes to a (magic) school and is pretty much the bestest student of all, overcomes the jealousy and scorn of her higher class fellow students, studies with a powerful teacher, etc. etc etc. And while this was well enough done, and in particular Rin's lessons with Jiang were intriguing, I did find it a bit disappointing on the whole.

But then war intervenes, before Rin's class can even graduate. The Mugens invade again, and the entire faculty and class of the academy are thrust into action, in defense of Sinegard. This is a desperate affair, as the government and most of the populace are evacuated, and the loss of the city seems certain. But Rin discovers how to access her particular power, through the Speerly's Phoenix god, and Jiang too -- very reluctantly -- takes magical action, and, at an awful cost, the invaders are repelled. 

But of course, Mugen does not give up, and soon Rin, now assigned to the Cike, a special division of the army usually reserved for missions of assassination, ends up in the coastal city of Khurdalain, again trying to fend off the Mugens, who have far superior numbers. Her leader now is Altan Tensen, who turns out to be a brilliant tactician and a hard man to work for, and a man who is also struggling with the breadth and danger of his powers, and with an associated opium addiction (the poppy helps people get to the mental state to access the Pantheon.) Rin herself is struggling to access her powers consistently, and in a controllable fashion. But she, and Altan, and their fellows in the Cike, are severely tested by both rivalries with the rest of the Army, and with the Mugen invasion, which culminated with atrocities in both Khurdulain and the major city of Golyn Niis. In the end they resolve desperately to risk freeing the shamans who have gone mad and are imprisoned under a mountain. This leads to a terrible final resolution, in which Rin must confront the risks of using her own access to the gods, especially the Phoenix, and also the moral costs of answering the Mugen atrocities with further atrocities. This is by far the best part of the book -- the moral questions are powerful, the depiction of the horrors of war (particularly the aftermath of this world's version of the Rape of Nanjing) are truly wrenching, and the story really begins to sing -- or perhaps I should say keen. The climax is horrifying, though also a bit anticlimactic -- and the book ends somewhat weakly, in part because it is setting up for the sequel.

In summary -- I think this is a promising first novel, and a remarkable book to have been written by a teenager, but it's not quite a finished product. The prose is inconsistent, and another editing pass would have helped greatly. The pacing is irregular, and I feel that the first half or more of the book should have been significantly cut -- there is important information there, but also some routine and not terribly involving busy work. The characters are a bit thin -- even Altan and Rin, the major characters, don't really convince. But it certainly suggests a writer worth watching -- and I can report that for instance her 2022 novel, Babel, which won the Nebula Award, is far better written, and more original as well.