While the traditional translation of the Chinese title 三国演义 is Romance of the Three Kingdoms, we’re talking about Romances of the old school, romances like the Song of Roland-stories about heroes, basically. If you come to fantasy for strategy, chivalry, loyalty, and the destiny of nations, look no further.
On my first read of Three Kingdoms, I was stunned by the martial heroics, but a simple moment when Liu Bei and Cao Cao share a drink in a plum garden stuck in my mind like a splinter under my fingernail. That question of loyalty gives the quietest scenes in Three Kingdoms thrilling power. The question of loyalty spins at the story’s heart: what does it mean to be a loyal subject, son, daughter, or brother? When a nation you love starts to fall apart, how do you save it, and when is it time to give up on saving and build something new? Cao Cao is cast as a villain in much of the novel, but he’s the one fighting on the side of the Empire, at least nominally of course, he’s installed a puppet Emperor and holds all real power, but when he fights, he’s ‘under the standard’ as it were. This book bursts with tactics, maneuvers, betrayals, and crossed motives. Three Kingdoms effortlessly wheels between court intrigue, battlefield grit, music-hall seduction, and fraught debate over mulled wine. As Liu, Guan, and Zhang gain followers, they challenge Cao Cao’s authority-to their own peril, as Cao marshals a crushing assault into the south. The action swings back and forth from Liu Bei and his friends, often one step ahead of certain doom, to Cao Cao, who smoothly assumes control of the empire, and the Sun family, entrenched in the southlands and preparing for war. Meanwhile, the scheming genius poet-tactician Cao Cao and the conflicted general Sun Ce, gain power Cao, the adopted son of a corrupt eunuch, maneuvers his way to the heart of the Imperial court where he seizes control of the Emperor, while Sun Ce flees to his ancestral homelands the south, branded a traitor. From relative obscurity, the three brothers rise to govern a city, command a province, and at last, to build a kingdom. Over the next hundred-twenty chapters, we follow these men, their comrades, their enemies, and their children through warfare, treason, the downfall of the dynasty, and the rise of a new era. They raise a small force of men, and set off to save the world. That summons brings together Liu Bei the noble, Guan Yu the scholar, and Zhang Fei the farmer, drunk, butcher, and all-around stalwart. The Emperor calls for recruits, and the call reaches the countryside where our heroes first gather. In the far West, an evangelical rebellion rises, with a yellow-turbaned leader with magical powers who believes he has been appointed by Heaven to overthrow the corrupt dynasty. In proper epic fantasy fashion, the book starts with signs and portents: green phantasmal serpents coiled around the imperial throne, hens transformed to roosters, dark clouds boiling up to fill ancestral shrines. This is the first chapter of a hundred-twenty chapter epic set in the twilight years of the Han dynasty, which ruled many of the lands now called China from 206 BCE to 220 CE. Together they pledge brotherhood, share a cup of wine in the shadow of the peach blossoms, and set out to change history. The men have only one point in common: they are patriots. One’s a poor minor noble-a cousin to the throne so distant that his surname is their only real connection. One’s a scholar, on the run because he killed a town bully. Three young men meet in a peach garden in their nation’s twilight. But, though set in a time of miracles, Three Kingdoms relies on the traditional Sword & Sorcery mix of cleverness, combat, and betrayal rather than prophecy or magic. At first glance, Three Kingdoms seems an epic fantasy, in that it describes the fall of a massive empire through the lens of central characters with dynastic ambition. That is, to borrow Liz Bourke’s definition of S&S: Journey to the West is a story of encounter, in which central characters going about their daily business keep running into strange, fascinating, terrifying things-and befriending them, or beating them about the head and shoulders, or both.īy contrast, let’s talk about one of the best war-and-intrigue novels of all time, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. For example: Journey to the West, which I talked about last month, is a story of high-flying magic, transformation, kung fu, divine war, and so on-that, for all its epic scope, reads more like Sword and Sorcery. The great old stories break and bend rules modern audiences take for granted.
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