The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck

 The Good Earth (1931) was not only a bestseller, it won the Pulitzer Prize.  Not bad for what was only her second novel.  Since then it became a classic, then sank into obscurity.  There is no reason for this; it remains a unique and hugely impressive work.

Buck knew China; she was brought up there by her missionary parents and spoke Chinese.  If her story of the peasant farmer Wang Lung seems slightly medieval it is because China was a medieval society before the Boxer rebellion.  His wife O-lan is a slave.  All women who are not either aristocrats or prostitutes are slaves.  The caste system is set in stone.  Yet Wang Lung rises through it, from rickshaw puller to owner of the big house in town.

He is not a hero without faults.  He does his duty by his wife and five children.  He honours senior relatives, even though his uncle is a bandit chief.  But he buys the prostitute Lotus for a second wife and ends up in his late sixties seducing her teenage slave Pear Blossom.  He is lustful for Lotus, protective of Pear Blossom, but the only one of his children he truly cares for is his eldest daughter, brain damaged as a result of malnutrition during a hard famine in the year of her birth,

The thing that drives and sustains Wang Lung is his land - the titular Good Earth.  He is born poor but is luckier than most because his father actually owns the land he works.  In due time he buys other parcels until he owns so much land he can rent it out to others.  He becomes rich but can never find peace until he retires to his old home on his original plot.  The sons he does not understand plan to sell it all when he dies.

Buck pulls off an astonishing technique.  I can think of only one equivalent, E L Doctorow's Ragtime, in which there is not a word of dialogue and yet you do not notice as you read.  Buck's characters are mostly nameless - we don't know the personal names of any of Wang Lung's children, for example.  But this only reinforces her theme: that people are just cogs in the vast social machine of China.  The only individuals, the only characters named, are the ones that manage to break out of their societal chains.