Boxers and Saints

Gene Luen Yang, 2013

(March 2014)

This is phenomenal.

Boxers and Saints is a two-part, slightly fantastical telling of the Boxer Rebellion in comic form, apparently aimed at a YA audience. I’d have loved to have been in the pitch meeting for that, if only to shake the hands of everyone involved in producing it. Seriously, this is outstanding.

As ever with books I love, I have very little coherent to say and am reduced to stutteringly incoherent sentence fragments. Believable characters, tragedy and comedy sitting cheek-by-jowl, expertly deployed fantastical elements that add to (but not distract from, which is so often the way) the story, and deceptively naive aesthetics which only serve to heighten the brutal moral greyness that descends about halfway through and chokes everything. Yang makes no excuses for anyone and the ending is crushing in a way you rarely experience in ‘adult’ works, never mind stuff notionally aimed at younger readers. And that, really, is the only criticism I can aim at Boxers and Saints: you have to read them both. This is one story in two volumes: reading the second straight after the first is a necessity and not doing so would create a markedly different and, I suspect, poorer experience.

If you have even a passing interest in the depressing history of European colonial misadventure in East Asia this is essential reading, and even if you don’t, and just like stories that move beyond pat characterization and come even close to the impossibly intricate complexity of real life, then this is something you need to experience. The hype, in this instance, is very much justified.