The Fox Wife - Yangtze Choo

 

I will confess that I struggled to start reading this book. Why, I hear you ask? Because I knew that once started I would read on and on until I had finished and once read it couldn't be unread. And I knew it would be one of those books where I would feel sad that I'd finished it because I would want it to go on forever and there may be quite a wait before the author's next book! Yangtze Choo is one of those authors who you could never call prolific but the old adage 'quality not quantity' applies here. I fell in love with this author's work when I read The Night Tiger. I was lucky enough to snaffle a proof before its 2019 publication date and I was also lucky enough to participate in a social media buddy read organised by the publisher Quercus Books. The book and that experience will stay with me for ever. 

The Fox Wife is a very different book in terms of content but the themes are still there, an element of fantasy, the nature of creatures and their place in our world, the convergence of humans, animals and spirits.

Foxes sometimes get a bad rap. Certainly in the UK urban foxes have become a familiar part of the landscape. I have one who visits regularly and gave birth to four cubs last season to the frustration of some neighbours around me and to the delight of myself! There is a certain mystique that they carry with them, in part through their physical appearance in that sense sometimes that they are laughing at you and something more, something undefined yet present in an other wordily sense.

That sense is captured here in the novel. 

'Manchuria, 1908.
In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman's identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they've remained tantalizingly out of reach--until, perhaps, now. 

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can't escape the curse that afflicts them--their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family's luck seems to change--or does it? 

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she's a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.'

Although we are given a year when the novel starts there is a timelessness to the narrative, a fey, almost dreamy sense as we begin our journey with Snow and Bao. It's a slow start, measured and controlled, offering us information, thoughts to conjure with, the reader can settle and adjust to an ambience of the Orient and a culture probably very different from the one they are used to. The notion of shapeshifting is fundamental to embracing the story. The mythology of foxes, so important in Chinese lore,  is prevalent and a sense of folk mythos, enigmatic yet tantalising. 

The chapters shift between Snow's perspective and Bao's. Both are on journeys with different intents; Snow to find a murderer and Bao to uncover the identity of a murdered courtesan. I loved the way the story progressed and developed as you feel the convergence of their two paths approaching.

Yangtze Choo's writing is hypnotic, mesmerising almost. Her characterisations are so empathic that even if a character is of dubious integrity there remains a draw, a pull, a desire to find the good in them. And the atmosphere she creates is almost surreal. And yet as well as being full of ethereal mystery it is also a detective tale! 

I feel credit too must be observed for the historical aspects of the novel, some serious research has been undertaken here and it all reads so authentically.  

My thanks to Ana McLaughlin at Quercus Books for a gifted proof.