Chang-rae Lee’s debut novel, Native Speaker, is one of my desert island books so his fourth book has quite a benchmark to live up to. The Surrendered is a departure from Lee’s previous efforts, being epic in scale and not written in the first person. The story centers on the lasting effects of the Korean War on three individuals whose lives intersect at an orphanage: June Han, a Korean orphan introduced in a brilliant but almost too graphically traumatic first chapter; Hector Brennan, an American soldier who stays in Korea after the war and becomes a handyman at the orphanage; and Sylvie Tanner, the wife of a missionary in charge of the orphanage.

June is the definition of resilience and relentlessness, bouncing back from seeing her parents and twin siblings die during the war, eating mud to quiet her hunger, establishing a thriving antiques shop in New York City and taking control of the treatment for her stomach cancer. “It was almost laughably ironic, that the cancer should be in her stomach. That she would die with her belly full.” Her final wish is to find her son Nicholas (who has run away to Europe after high school while still providing clues of his whereabouts in times of financial need) before she succumbs to the disease. She has made up her mind that Hector, who is Nicholas’ father, is to be with her for the trip. Hector and June were briefly married, allowing June into the States. June thinks that since Hector is the boy’s father, he should somehow be able to figure out where Nicholas is, and convince him to be his mother’s son again.

Hector, despite his movie star good looks and a name from Greek mythology, is a force that pulls people down. He blames himself for the drowning death of his father—instead of the Friday night routine of picking up his drunk father at the local bar, Hector decides to sleep with a married woman and his father walks off never to be seen again—and goes off to war in hopes of forgetting his guilt, or perhaps of being forgotten. However, Hector has the ability to remain undamaged (he drinks a lot but never gets drunk, fights a lot but his bruises heal by the next day) and escapes being physically hurt during the war, though not psychologically. “It was amazing but, through all the battles and firefights and skirmishes, he’d never been seriously injured: he’d been knifed and shot, even hit by shrapnel, but they were always superficial strikes, glancing off him as if he were shielded by the harder steel of some mysterious fortune.” In his mind, maybe rightfully, he considers himself cursed and a curse to those he meets.

At the end of the war Hector helps June into the orphanage, where they meet Sylvie, the beautiful wife of a missionary who is charged with running the orphanage. Sylvie herself is a broken woman: she carries the memory of witnessing her own missionary parents’ massacre in Manchuria as a young child; she is a heroin addict; and she is married to a strict and very moral man. June and Hector compete for Sylvie’s affection and approval. Hector becomes her lover: “He couldn’t help but pause, as everyone did, whenever he caught a glimpse of Sylvie Tanner, her hair as it fell against the grave paleness of her shoulders glowing as vibrantly as anything he had seen since being in this desolated country.” Meanwhile June gets the idea that she will be adopted by the Tanners and taken back to the States. These actions culminate in a fire that destroys the orphanage, from which Hector rescues June but not Sylvie.

June hires a private investigator to look for Hector and to find her son’s trail in Europe. Hector is now working as a janitor in a Korean strip mall in New Jersey, trying to squander his time away and, perhaps, to forget the guilt he has accumulated through his life, when June comes back to ask him for a favor: she asks him to rescue her once more.

After an accident (a car crash wiping out two people of some importance that seems like another forced plot machination), Hector travels to Italy with June in search of Nicholas.

The three main characters in the book all seem to be running away from something, be it June from her hunger, Hector from his guilt, Sylvie from the pain of her parents’ death. The sadness in the novel is felt throughout, and there isn’t as much redemption as there is hope, even if it is for the ultimate surrender.

Lee has always created excellent prose. He has precise command of language and his writing is as good as ever in The Surrendered. The characters are memorable; the novel is readable and satisfying. However, some of the action tended to be strained; too many coincidences were needed to move the plot forward. In the end—and this should not prevent one from picking this book as an introduction to Lee’s elegant works—The Surrendered does not supplant Native Speaker from my desert island list.