★★★★★ Rise and fall

The Good Earth Trilogy

Pearl S Buck

** spoiler alert **

I read The Good Earth Trilogy: The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided when I was in high school. I picked up The Good Earth because it appeared on classics reading lists. I think I was vaguely aware when I began it that it took place in China. It was a great story, and I subsequently read the other two books of the trilogy, Sons and A House Divided. They're pretty much smooshed together in my memory, so this one review will serve for all three. The plot synopses on the individual book pages will give you a fairly good idea of how the story is divided up between them.

So, fundamentally, The Good Earth Trilogy is a familiar story. It's one of those old stories that gets told again and again through time. Specially, it is the "rise and fall of a family" story. Other examples that come immediately to mind are Buddenbrooks, The Thorn Birds, and A Dream of Red Mansions. Among these The Good Earth is a little unusual in that it explicitly chronicles the rise of the farmer Wang Lung to wealth. (In Buddenbrooks and Dream of Red Mansions, in contrast, the rise of the family is in the past and is recounted only in the memories of older family members.)

Wang is a farmer with a deep connection to the land, hence the title. He marries a Hakka woman O-lan, who was a slave to a wealthy nearby wealthy family. She describes herself repeatedly as "ugly", she has dark skin and big feet. When Wang comes to take her away, her old mistress admonishes her "Obey him and bear him sons and yet more sons." This she does. Three sons -- also daughters, but they barely count. Daughters are routinely referred to as "slaves". Still, Wang loves his daughters, although he is almost ashamed of it.

Because of his connection to the Earth and his skill as a farmer and O-lan's support, Wang is successful and he becomes wealthy, wealthy enough to purchase the land of the formerly rich family whose slave O-lan was. He now can afford to buy slaves of his own, and in addition take a second wife. Wang's wealth begins to separate him from the Earth, and thus the decline of the family begins. His sons, having grown up in wealth, have expensive tastes and little inclination for hard work. The final book, A House Divided, depicts a country at war. Soldiers are depicted here as the worst possible scourge of a country. They eat and steal everything. This is a hard book to read.

As an American myself, I can only guess whether this is an accurate or sympathetic portrayal of China. Pearl S. Buck was an American, but when she wrote The Good Earth at the age of 39, she had lived almost her entire life in China, and she in fact wrote it in Nanking. (This and other biographical details come from her Wikipedia page.) She was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, but she had little respect for the mission -- in fact, little more than a year after publication of The Good Earth she left The Presbyterian Board after giving a speech in which she argued that "China did not need an institutional church dominated by missionaries who were too often ignorant of China and arrogant in their attempts to control it." It seems quite certain that Buck knew and loved China well. But, in addition to a classical Chinese education, she received a Western (meaning, of course, European) education. She vocally opposed the Chinese communists, and therefore was viewed as an enemy. I do not know what the Chinese now think of her, if they do at all.

Well, that interesting question aside, The Good Earth is a beautiful novel.

Amazon review

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