Desperation practically ekes out of Ryan Graudin's The Walled City. These are characters gambling with enormous stakes — much more dire than simply staying alive. Jin, Mei Yee, and Dai are dangling above the precipice of human agony.
Jin Ling lives in Hak Nam Walled City of her own volition, surviving by stealing food and necessities, and running like hell. She is also searching for her sister, sold, by their father years before, to a drug lord.
Mei Yee, forced into sex work, lives caged in a brothel, under constant threat. Mei Yee has no other option but to sit, stagnant, in her prison, and let waves of horror and misery wash over her.
Dai cannot bring himself to set foot outside of the Walled City. He is trying desperately to free himself from a cage of his own making, and he must enlist Jin Ling's talents to do so, by compromising the drug lord Longwai.
A note on the book's setting... Based off of Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, Graudin's Hak Nam Walled City is a gritty, compelling backdrop. Like its real world inspiration, Hak Nam is a re-purposed fort adjacent to a larger metropolis, turned into an over-packed mess of people stacked up on top of each other. It's a cluster of anarchy — full of gang activity, drug running, and human trafficking. In regards to time and place — it was a little confusing. It's my deduction that The Walled City is set an indeterminate Asian country, during an indeterminate period of modernity.
At this point, after detailing the characters and setting, it might seem like I'm going to make a glowing recommendation. But, this is not the case. In fact, I believe that this book was more promising than successful. There were definitely some admirable aspects to it, but I would strongly hesitate in recommending the book to other readers.
One reason for this concerns the book's style. On one hand, Graudin's voice utilizes effective dirty realism. The setting of the walled city — its grime, its poverty, its depravity — sprung to life on the page. On the other hand, there was an extraordinary amount of purple prose. I felt like I was drowning in a sea of similes and and conceits. At best, I felt some appreciation for the imagination of Graudin's writing. At worst, the prose was so clogged with stylistic elements that I was jarred out of the story completely.
Then, there was the pacing. This is a story that could have benefited from a break-neck pace. Instead, the plot was structured around an 18-day countdown. A mistake, in my opinion. I slogged through the story. My attention struggled to find a grasp. Instead of propelling the plot forward, the narration got bogged down in reminisces and extraneous tangents.
Another complaint — Graudin falls into the tired trope of instantaneous attraction. (AKA — insta-love) As if I wasn't rolling my eyes enough over the melodramatic prose, all of the hot flashes and abdominal tingling of the love-struck characters sent me over the edge. What made this nascent relationship extra questionable is that it involved a horribly abused girl who had been forced into sex work. Giving her such a shallow plot-line really diminished the utter gravity of her situation. I could not switch over emotionally from descriptions of horrific, sexual abuse to scenes of giddy young love. It caused me to withdraw emotionally from the story.
It's a shame that this book had such fatal flaws. If the style had been plainer, the plot brisker, the relationships more thoughtful, I could see myself enjoying this book for its resonant setting and high-stakes storyline. As it is, I give The Walled City two north stars out of five.
