(I try to avoid “spoiler warnings” but, as a courtesy, since this book is not yet published I will note that my approach to review will include discussion of plot elements including from the end of the book. Please consider yourself forewarned.)

This book kind of drove me crazy.

The Water Outlaws is an upcoming 2023 novel written by S.L. Huang and published by Tordotcom. It is a loose adaptation of a little more than the first half of the classic 水浒传 (variously translated as Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men are Brothers – I will prefer the first of these translations throughout this review) – one of the four classics of Chinese literature and one of the first structurally modern novels in the world.

I have to admit that when I first heard of this novel I knew immediately I had to read it. After all Water Margin is a favourite of mine and the proposed premise: a gender-swapped version of the text in which the Liangshan bandits are principally women was a very compelling pitch. After all, the question of gendered violence looms very large within the original material. In particular the early stories of Song Jiang and Lu Zhishen provide contrasting lens on the violence men do to women and the ethical questions that this violence raises as Lu murders an abusive butcher for mistreating a concubine and must conceal himself in a monastery and as Song shows no interest in his wife who takes a lover and whose entanglements leads to his murder of them both. It would not be a stretch, in the slightest, to describe Song Jiang as textually a gay character. Later within the story he falls in with the savage Li Kuei and the homoerotic frisson between the two is palpable – which adds pathos to their tragic end.

However it’s somewhat surprising how much of that angle Huang’s book ignores. Certainly the question of gendered violence against women looms large within The Water Outlaws while nods are made toward queer sexualities via the presence of trans and gender-fluid secondary characters but what is kind of strange is the extent to which the queer content of the text being adapted is backgrounded in favour of the introduction of novel elements to stand in for it. A less charitable reader might be inclined to suggest that Huang wanted to make the aspect of the queer less problematic by smoothing the jagged edges off Song Jiang and by distancing her from Li Kuei within the adapted text but I’m not sure that was Huang’s aim. After all, it’s not like Huang shies away from some of the protagonistic violence intrinsic to this story, including a scene of ritual retributive cannibalism that honestly took me by surprise with its dissonance from prior chapters. This becomes then one of the tensions in this adaptation that demonstrates some of what has been driving me crazy.

In Cinema 2 Deleuze discusses a concept called “the powers of the false” which is a novel method for addressing the question of simulacra and the real. In it he discusses how Leibniz attempts to defend the idea of truth within time via the concept of the incompossible and suggests that Leibniz only postpones the problem of truth within time, putting forward what he calls “Borges’s reply to Leibniz: the straight line as force of time, as labyrinth of time, is also the line which forks and keeps on forking, passing through incompossible presents, returning to not-necessarily true pasts.”

An adaptation creates an incompossible present within a work. Clearly The Water Outlaws is an adaptation of Water Margin – and not a half-bad one at that. There is a very strong truncated translation of the first 65 chapters of Water Margin here. This translation actually demonstrates, to a certain extent, the superfluity of the headline grabbing gender-swap. Lin Chong and Lu Da are still very much themselves regardless of whether the pronoun “he” or “she” is applied to them. Specific incidents are also rendered with care, attention and substantial craft. The wine dipping robbery is adapted far better in this work than by Guy Gavriel Kay when he mined the same text for River of Stars. It’s impossible to come away from The Water Outlaws without being absolutely certain that Huang is deeply familiar with and has a great deal of reverence for the work being adapted.

However this is also, undoubtedly and with certainty not a translation of Water Margin. As already mentioned Song Jiang’s rough edges are smoothed down and she ends up somewhat less queer than her namesake. In addition other characters retain little more than a name, their stories contorted to such an extent that it’s difficult to map them onto the characters they are derived from. Fan Rui is dissimilar to her counterpart in almost every single capacity and Lu Junyi is likewise transformed, brought into the story far earlier and with a different set of relationships than anything from the original.

Some of this is tied to the method in which the book interrogates gendered violence, making of Gao Qiu and Cai Jing even broader and more caricatured representations of their historical counterparts than in Water Margin – a task which is no mean feat considering the negative light the original casts these two officials in. But the other reason has to do with the second book that The Water Outlaws is. Because, on top of being a decent truncated translation of Water Margin, The Water Outlaws is a passable secondary world fantasy story. These novel fantasy elements aren’t built entirely on air. Several characters within Water Margin are sorcerers and magicians with magic powers. Dai Zong has magical talismans that allow him to travel 800 li in a day (approximately 400 kilometers) and Gongsun Sheng is a powerful mystic and instructor in magic to several other magically inclined characters. However, again, there is an odd doubling at play here as Gongsun Sheng is mentioned in passing only as being unavailable for recruitment and Dai Zong is not mentioned at all.

Instead a magical talisman is given to Lu Da (Lu Zhishen) and Lu Junyi and Fan Rui are sequestered into an entirely original storyline regarding Cai Jing’s plot to fabricate and mass-produce magical talismans for the military. These talismans tie into a metaphysical other-space that also serves to flesh out the relationship between Lu Da and Lin Chong – whose sisterhood is the central relationship of Huang’s book – but both the metaphysical character of that other-space and how these talismans relate to the “scholar’s powers” which are The Water Outlaws‘ version of the neigong and qinggong powers of wuxia stories is left decidedly vague. I’m somewhat glad of this. I’ve mentioned previously that I am not fond of systematics in magic and the lack of causal definition around the various manifestations of magic in Huang’s book is satisfactorily non-systematic. However it does then return us to our incompossible texts. The Water Outlaws is simultaneously both an iteration of Water Margin and not at all.

“Narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying. This is not at all a case of ‘each has its own truth’, a variability of content. It is a power of the false which replaces and supersedes the form of the true, because it poses the simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts.” Deleuze says and certainly this idea of the adaptation as the false is entirely apropos here. However I do want to step back and mention that Deleuze says, and I agree, that the regime of the false is described by the Nietzschean will to power. Deleuze argues that it is Nietzsche rather than Leibniz who settles the problem of truth in time, “in opposition to Leibniz, in favour of the false and its artistic, creative power.” In this sense it’s in its incompossibilty that the adaptation becomes a creative work. When I’ve spoken before about translation and the idea of the false-aleph I’ve argued effectively that all translation is likewise incompossible with the original text. As such much of what gives Huang’s work value is its deviation from its source.

First, of course, is the truth that there is a vast distance between the prose style of an early-modern novel penned in 14th century China and a contemporary English language work of genre fiction published by Tordotcom. Huang does hold many of the hallmarks of the Tordotcom curatorial style. Characters are rendered in very close third person. We have multiple perspective characters but from a limited roster of about five total characters out of a far-larger cast. There is considerable attention paid to the emotional lives of the protagonists and antagonists alike when they hold the perspective and the audience is immediately privy to their reflections upon their immediate situation however that internal voice is almost entirely in the moment. The narrator can tell us how Lin Chong feels now but gives much less narrative attention to how Lin Chong’s affect may have changed over time. Instead this is inferred by the audience via the stream of consciousness throughout the various episodes. The visual character of environments is rendered in loving and careful detail but I’d be hard pressed to tell you what anything in the world of the novel smelled or tasted like. In fact, beyond the realm of sight and sound the material sensations of our perspective characters are limited to only one item: pain.

It’s remarkable the way Huang is able to use the immediacy of her protagonists’ internality in order to describe how they hurt, how they are injured, and how they react to hurt. Lin Chong’s tendency to deny her pain, to minimize it and push it to the back of her mind becomes a useful vehicle for understanding her. What is odd though is that it’s not merely Lin Chong’s sublimated masochism that use the percept of pain to communicate but rather a whole host of other affects. Meanwhile nothing tastes, nothing smells, and nothing feels good. This is an evolution of the Novelization Style to a certain extent. Interiority is reintroduced but we are still mostly left with a book that would be easily adapted to a screen.

There is also the question of tone. This book cuts off almost immediately before the tragic turn in Water Margin. In the original text the first two imperial invasions happen in much the same way that the end battle transpires in The Water Outlaws. The 108 Stars of Destiny hold their grand assembly and begin engaging in heroics against corrupt ministers throughout the country. This is where Huang’s book ends: our heroes happy in their sisterhood (if made bittersweet by the death of a small number of secondary characters) and transforming empire via truth and justice.

But of course this isn’t how things pan out for Water Margin.

The empire grants the bandits of Liangshan an amnesty, yes, but then throws them into a meatgrinder of bandit raids and border skirmishes which slowly whittles their numbers down. In all two thirds of the 108 stars die in combat. Lin Chong is paralyzed, Lu Zhishen achieves enlightenment and dies in meditation. Song Jiang is compelled by Cai Jing to drink poison and, fearing that Li Kuei would create havoc to avenge him, he poisons Li Kuei with the same poison. They die together. Water Margin serves as a tragedy. The tragic flaw of our heroes is the very loyalty to the Emperor which is also their great virtue. Song Jiang is incapable of escaping Cai Jing’s web because of his proximity to the emperor. The corrupt ministers win. By ending around chapter 60 Huang is able to sustain the illusion that Liangshan really can transform empire – that patriarchy can be overcome without overcoming the other power structures in which it’s inextricably entangled. Cai Jing dies with a tent spar through his mangled guts, dispatched by Lu Junyi in secret and so he will never poison Song Jiang.

Pivoting the conclusion of this story from tragic acceptance that to be governed is to be governed by corrupt ministers to one where our heroes all bask in the warm glow of the possibility of change is the most incompossible element of The Water Outlaws and it leaves me deeply ambivalent. There is a part of me that wants Huang to revisit this well and tell the rest of the story but it isn’t the same story. The Water Outlaws derives its creative vitality from its deviation from the story. Certainly this story contains a few elements of fiction that often irritate me: It is triumphal in its liberalism, its certainty that empire can be reformed. It passes by problematic queer content in favour of a universalist view of sisterhood that is simpler to parse in moral terms (although it is never precisely moralizing). But, on the other hand, it is honest about the horrific character of violence, even when it is being executed by a perspective protagonist. Huang’s talent for visual description extends to the grotesque and to the strange and things are described with clarity and artistry. We have a clear sense of the emotional life of our protagonists and if the narrative voice is something of a house style at this point it is, at least, a very well executed example of the house style. And while I was somewhat disappointed with the changes to Song Jiang I persist in thinking that it wasn’t a matter of Huang cringing away from a difficult topic so much as a desire to focus on Lin Chong and Lu Da rather than Song Jiang. I think ultimately my frustration is this: This is a good book. It’s well worth reading if you are a fantasy reader. But there is, on the page, a better book that is caught in a tangle of insertions that bring it down from the heights it could otherwise have achieved. It’s this third, mutually incompossible, text that I most want to read.