On such a full sea

Lee's prose is really beautiful and poetic. He made the novelty of narration by a collective ‘we' feel natural in the story; having said that though, the narration also felt inconsistent - at times its voice was recanting the story as if it was a folk tale, other times switching to omniscience, always keeping the reader at a distance from the main character. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but the ‘this is what we know of these events' voice vs ‘omniscient voice when convenient' felt a bit too much like slack editorial oversight.

The passivity of the main character is my main problem with the story. It was very hard to see just why other characters felt so much for Fan and wanted to further her despite her passivity. I expected this to be a typical quest narrative, but I'm not sure if this is an ingenious take on it with a message of the futility of trying too hard, or a failure to execute one of the simplest classical narratives in an engaging way (which is pretty had to pull off in a quest narrative! just ask any investigative journalist). Either way it didn't convince me, and large parts of the story felt completely redundant (although the quality of Lee's prose redeems them to some extent).