What’s Happening?

My current reading is Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, an amiable, eccentric pseudo-Victorian work.  Reading it is pleasurable, but I’m over 100 pages in and as yet have no idea what the novel is about, if anything.  Amiable eccentric Victorians amble through the work encountering one another, and there either is or isn’t a sea monster lurking off in the estuary (I rather think there isn’t), and people might or might not love one another, but everyone is reasonably reasonable and there doesn’t seem to be a lot at stake.  The work’s one nasty character dies in Chapter One.

It’s so well written that I’ve kept going, but now I’m wondering why I need to continue.  Maybe I’ve got the point already.  Is it possible to write a work where there’s no conflict and everyone is perfectly nice?

Well, yes.  That book would be The Great Passage, by Shion Miura, about some amiably eccentric Japanese lexicographers who set out to create a new dictionary of the Japanese language.  This seems to be a more difficult task than it might be in English, and it’s a project that takes more than one generation to complete.  There’s no real conflict and there’s not a lot at stake (except whether the dictionary gets finished in one or another decade), but it kept me reading straight through while experiencing nothing but delight.

If you want to experience a conflict-free book— in other words, a literary impossibility— I’d pick the Miura if I were you.