Visitors to Random will know by now that I am not a particularly adventurous reader and I tend to stick to a particular genre or author(s) that I know and love. I can only admire bloggers who pitch in and try everything, Bookerthons, Readeathons, Rushdiethons and so forth, I just sit back and let them read and then tell me all about it. This is not something that has crept up on me with the advancing years and the mantle of Grumpy Old Woman, I have always been like this. I was a Grumpy Old Teenager I can tell you and I avoided modern novels like the plague at the advanced age of 15 onwards, preferring Austen, Dickens, Bronte et al and history and biography. Of course, I am aware that this leaves astounding great gaps in my reading life and though I have made efforts to fill these over the last ten years or so when books groups and blogs have inspired me to try something, I have slipped back into my old ways and have now resolved to stay there happy with the odd foray into something new every now and then to stop my brain totally atrophying.
This long preamble is merely to say, in a very roundabout way, that this particular book by Lisa See would not have caught my eye normally. It is set in 17th century China, a country about which I know very little, and about whose traditions I am totally ignorant. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition with the Olympic Games being in China, and the mention of an opera at the start of this story that made me feel I might have a crack at this. And how glad I am I did as I was totally beguiled by this simply lovely book.
Peony hears a performance of an opera, the Peony Pavilion, performed on her fifteenth birthday, She has always lived in the cloistered women's quarters of her family villa and while the men can watch this opera freely, the women are hidden behind screens. Peony is to marry a man she has never seen but she yearns to feel love as the heroine in this opera with whom she feels an affinity. During the performance she slips away into garden and there meets an elegant, handsome man with whom she becomes bewitched. He is also betrothed and though they fall in love immediately, they know they can never be together.
After her birthday Peony begins to study the opera even more closely and identifies with the doomed 
Liniang who dies of love and in her second life undertakes a ghost marriage with the man she has left behind on her death. Peony becomes obsessed with this idea and gradually stops eating, she becomes ill and weaker and weaker and dies. Only after her death does she find out that the man she met during the opera and with whom she fell in love, was her betrothed husband. She has died for nothing.
In the aftermath of her death, her ancestral tablet is put to one side and the ritual which would allow her soul to pass into the next life, is incomplete and she is condemned to an eternity on the Viewing Pavilion watching her family, her life which she threw away and also her lost husband, Ren. Difficult to describe from this point on just how fascinating and beautiful the rest of this story is but I will try.
Ren marries several years later, to Ze, a cousin of Peony who had been jealous of her and who is eager to take her place and her husband. As a 'hungry ghost', one who has no home and no place to rest, Peony resides in the home of Ren and becomes a 'sister wife' to Ze who is aware that her spirit is abroad. Using the full force of her will Peony turns her from an unpleasant, jealous woman to a good wife to Ren, all the time longing for her ghost marriage with Ren which will bring her happiness in her after life.
Peony meets her grandmother in the Viewing Pavilion and, later, her mother who have dreadful tales to tell of their rape and suffering at the hands of the Manchu during the Cataclysm. Peony realises that she knew nothing about her parent and understood them even less when she was alive. It is only after her death that she is able to mature and grow into a wise and loving woman.
Sounds odd to say that there is a happy ending bearing in mind the circumstances of the story, but there is one and I found it quite moving. The rituals and customs of the living and the dead are portrayed beautifully and there is a delicacy and grace in their description. While reading this book, I found myself feeling very peaceful and almost physically light, very difficult to put this emotion into words, there was just a feeling of beauty and orderliness and rightness about each and every action.
"... they put me in padded undergarments so I might be warm in winter, and then they slipped my limbs into the silk gowns and satin tunics that had been made for my dowry....for my outer layer I wore a padded silk jacket with sleeves embroidered in an elaborate and very colourful kingfisher pattern...Mama placed a sliver of jade in my mouth to safeguard my body. Second Aunt tucked coins and rice in my pockets so I might sooth the rabid dogs I'd meet on the way to the after world. Third Aunt covered my face with a thin piece of white silk. Fourth Aunt tied coloured string around my waist to prevent me from carrying away any of our family's children and around my feet to restrain my body from leaping about should I be tormented by evil spirits on my journey"
A elegant, satisfying book. Please do read it if you can.
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