re:mote voices

Title: Water Lilly
Author: Susanna Jones
Publisher:Picador

Water Lilly is the second novel by English novelist Susanna Jones, which again follows from her own time in Japan with a story of cultural encounters. Water Lilly is a little harder to get into than her debut novel, The Earthquake Bird, given that neither of the two lead characters are particularly likeable.

Difficult characters seeming to be at the core of Jones’ work, Lucy in The Earthquake Bird was fairly individual, abandoning her homeland and going to Japan with the idea that it was as far away as she could get. For me at least though, Lucy had a spark, for all her reluctance to get involved with other people, and her perhaps anti-social persona, there was still something likeable about her. Ralph and Runa however come across differently. Though in saying that Runa is more of a selfish character, manipulating events to her own end, trying to get things to go her way – which doesn’t actually make her an entirely bad person. Ralph however is really difficult, in some ways he is weakly naïve, what might be described as being wet – a bumbling Englishman who has travelled to Japan to find his “eastern blossom”. Which in itself would only make him a woolly character, but as we get more into who he his, we see his ideas are sexist and old-fashioned – he is too readily taken in by the corporate propaganda of what he should expect from Asian women, but how closely his own feelings line-up with these illusions is what makes him somehow contemptible and pathetic.

The novel is written in two parts, two books within the book, and throughout the narrative switches between the two leads. Runa is an English teacher is a rural, village school, and bored she has started an affair with one of her pupils. Which is fine, until she receives a black mail threat, putting her into a panic with the anticipation of the disgrace that will come her way if her actions come out. With this in mind she steals her sister’s passport and decides to flee from Japan to China. Ralph is an English businessman in his 40’s, who has set up meetings with several young Japanese women, with the hope that one of them will be his ideal bride. However Ralph is rude, unattractive, and to his surprise Japanese women are slightly more wilful and independent than he expected – so that while a woman from another Asian country might have been motivated by desperation, a Japanese women really requires more than Ralph has to offer. Feeling rejected and put out, Ralph decides to go for his back up plan, arranging to meet with a plain-looking Chinese woman he has found on the internet, he sets off for Shanghai. Which covers the action for this part, introducing us to the two leads, and propelling them both to the same boat journey to China.

Between the slim elements which make the characters sympathetic – Runa’s feelings from when her mother died while she was still a child, and Ralph’s failed marriage to a previous Asian woman after a visit to Thailand – and the general momentum of events, I started to find that I was getting into Water Lilly more than I had been at first. The second part and the meetings of the two characters is where it propels itself along. The characters are fleshed out, through the events that have led them to this juncture as well as the emerging histories of the pair. Jones also mixes in extracts from the brochures that Ralph is using as his guide to Asian women, providing some insight into the clichés and illusions, which are in some ways appalling, and at the same time contrasted by the reality of the characters encountered.

As with The Earthquake Bird, Susanna Jones has something of an unconventional approach to writing with Water Lilly, which again provides enviable results.