Review: Romance of the Three Kingdoms

On a mostly spur-of-the-moment whim, I’ve decided to put short reviews of books I’ve read on here. This might extend to games and movies in the future, but we’ll see. It definitely appeals to me much more than having a storygraph or letterboxd or whatever the fuck and reducing my thoughts to a star rating.¹ I want to post somewhere where I can be as loose and personal as I wish, and I don’t have to pretend that having an objective opinion on media is a real thing.

This is a book I should have read 15 years ago. I mean that quite literally. When I was younger, my Dynasty Warriors hyperfixation fully formed, I then learnt about the original novel. In a period where my mum became fervently obsessed with me needing to read fiction—apparently the copious amount of non-fiction I read not being good enough—she was trying to find things I would be interested in, and I asked her to get me Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Reading the preview page on amazon, my mum’s exact words were: “Oh, no, why do you want to read something like this?”

I was so pissed off by that I refused to read fiction novels until well into my late teens.

So this review feels like a nice way to capstone this saga. Finally, vindicating my younger self, I’ve read the damn book. And I’m sure my younger self would have liked reading the damn book.

That said, I’m calling this a “review” for consistency’s sake, but this is really a novel that’s unreviewable. Like, literally what can I say about it that will have any impact on anything? What can my white ass say that 500 years of Chinese scholarship can’t? It was influenced by and continues to influence so much you could dedicate the rest of your life to studying it.² It’s a novel so grand in scale and scope that it’s effectively beyond any sort of critique. 

It’s like it’s, you know, a classic.

Scene-by-scene, despite being a novel entirely about men being in war, there were a lot more scenes of war than I expected. The majority of it is descriptions of battle formations, who’s in the van and rear, who’s taking what post, and which major character died in the clash. Maybe because I’m so used to the character-focused approach RoTK adaptations take that I expected the novel to be much the same.

Not to say that there aren’t character moments, and when there are they’re fantastic. It was also really interesting seeing what historical facts were stretched or squashed for narrative effect. Huang Zhong’s life getting extended up until Xiaoting, then making a whole scene out of Shu’s old guard passing on, is a prime example. Him dying from food poisoning or whatever while in peacetime would have just been a bit shit, honestly.

There are exceptions, though. Zhu Ran, the poor fucking guy, shows up for half a chapter and dies 27 years before he did historically. What the fuck was that?

Wu in general gets the real short end of the stick, the more I think about it. Zhou Yu gets so mad about Zhuge Liang doing literally anything he vomits blood and dies. Next to none of his military achievements get mentioned, or Zhuge Liang steals them. I’d like to thank Japan’s Wu obsession for giving these guys a moment in the spotlight.

The Moss Roberts translation also comes with a host of context notes and citations,³ which were very nice to have, and also introduced a whole meta-narrative on top of the whole thing. The wide-spread (and thus most influential) version of RotK we have is a version edited by Mao Zonggang. This version has heavy edits that cull a lot of sections that meander, or just don’t make any sense. Even after an old 1522 version was discovered and republished in the 80s, the Mao recension still reigns supreme as the definitive literary edition.

These edits, also, made Cao Cao look significantly worse and removed some of the subtle negatives from some characters in Shu, giving Wei and Shu stans alike even more fuel for their never-ending flame wars. There’s also a case to be made that those edits were also hinting at Mao’s opinions of the recent Qing conquest of Ming, but, we have no idea if this was explicit support or subtle denunciation. Even though Mao left a hefty amount of commentary on the book, almost all of it is aesthetic, or Confucian analysis, and with the Qing Manchus deliberately undergoing  sinicisation, you can argue both ways for how his comments reflect the new dynasty. We also know next to nothing about his personal or family life, not giving us the benefit of who he associated with or how his family was impacted by the period.

Like, think about that for a second. One of the most influential works of fiction in all human history, may have been retroactively edited as political commentary, potentially to the effect of propaganda. And we have no idea what the propaganda actually is. How wild is that?

There are moments where the book starts to lag, beyond poor treatment of certain figures, Wu and beyond. I did have stretches where I was pushing on purely on plot recognition, waiting for the next Big Scene to get excited about. You can say what you like about Mao’s edits, but I could not imagine this being 250k characters longer to literary benefit.

And for Mao himself, just, I’m kind of obsessed with him. He’s very clearly more than talented with literary analysis and what makes a book work (and clearly did something right with how iconic his edition is), and also has such a passionate love for the novel that borders on a zealous need to explain how good it is, to the point of editing it to this degree. There’s several paragraphs where he annotates every single line with a comment about how the author is a complete genius. While also removing nearly a third of their words. I love you, man.

I think most importantly, reading the book made me realise what my actual love for anything Three Kingdoms is. It’s how this story’s evolved, and the interplay between fiction and reality. The two are, effectively, infinite sources of inspiration; we are constantly discovering new historical information around the period, and people will always be thinking of new and novel ways to reinterpret the fiction. Rather than caring about how “accurate” a RoTK adaptation is to the actual history, or the novel, or whatever, I’m far more interested in how you’re interpreting it to specific effect. It’s how, from a collection of folk and professional plays, we got the original novel in the first place.

So, yeah. One of the most influential novels of all time is pretty good. Shocking.

To say if I recommend it or not is… a loaded question. It’s a classic, it’s very long, and focuses on dynamics and philosophy that are almost entirely alien to someone who’s only engaged with Western media. It’ll expand your horizons, in a much similar way to being dunked in an ice bath. I’ll parrot the same thing many have before me: you should not read the original novel if you’re not already familiar with Three Kingdoms. Coming from a combination of Dynasty Warriors, some games, some movies, I only had about a dozen new characters I didn’t know by name. I could not imagine someone going into this from zero.

I’ve got plans to get through the rest of the Four Classic Novels, but I’m burning through some contemporary stuff first. I’ve got my eyes on Water Margin next, just because I saw it had dick jokes thanks to a skim-read of its Wikipedia.