Book Review | The Horror Of War Through The Prism Of Sci-fi

One day, she finds herself thrust onto a battlefield on an unknown planet that she knows nothing about, to fight a war that she has little stake in. She is expendable. So, she fights not to win but to get out of it all alive, as unlikely as it may seem. In the face of a hostile new land and certain death, her only reliable weapon for the most part is a chipped blade in an ornamented red scabbard. The cost of war must be paid. But, as is often the case, not by those who wage it.

The war is fought amid literal fog on a largely monochromatic battlefield. The empire is grey; the enemy, white; deadly giant birds, black; blood, red; the female prisoners, whatever the colours of their skirts and scabbards, while the male ones get even less recognition. The splashes of colour shape an identity in the barren, inherently hostile landscape. The machines’ hums are only broken by small instances of organic sounds. Sounds like screeches, screams and names are simply noise that breaks the vibrational harmony of an armed assault. That is where the merit of Chung’s writing lies. The liberties of science fiction are put to appropriate use: there is no fixed idea that the imagery of war is meant to convey; it simply is, and responsibility for interpretation falls on the reader. Violence against the human prisoners who neither side wants alive. The only grounding element is, as the novel’s title would suggest, a red scabbard and a red skirt.

The indiscriminate violence is broken through the occasional flashes of human emotions, and the “Double Helix I – IV” sections that tell the legend of a king who became immortal (and what it entailed). This reading of the novel seems to draw my attention towards the human cost of the Korean War (1950-53). The Korean War, seen as one of the first Cold War proxy conflicts, divided a people; its cost was not merely a new border, but a lasting loss of belonging. What followed was the erasure of older identities and the construction of new national myths, each requiring the other side to become less than human in its eyes. Yet the erasure of former identities did not necessarily lead to new understandings of nationalism in the nation’s philosophical composition. It is that “fog”, the disillusionment of which being one among many other contending feelings that Chung attempts to give shape. To me, it is a good attempt, especially with Anton Hur’s masterful translation.

While my reading reminds me of a context-specific conflict, Bora Chung’s Red Sword is a welcome use of her skill to go beyond the magical realist horror, and towards stark realism forwarded as sci-fi. It is a testament to the human cost and the gendered face of war; a grim yet timely reminder in this age that saw a systematic dismantling of diplomacy.

Ankit Rath is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford, UK.

Red Sword

By Bora Chung

Tr. Anton Hur

Pan Macmillan

pp. 183; Rs 399/-