“‘He could die,’ I said, fiddling with one of the chewy caramel packs neatly lined up on the display stand.”
“‘Is that so?’”
By far the most interesting thing about this novel, is just how bad it is! The next thing that catches the reader’s attention – the only other thing – is how incredibly well it is selling.
And it’s not so hard to understand once you get your hands on this mess, and roll through a few lazy paragraphs. Every page crashes with clichés, circles back to quickly repeating literary devices, has the up-and-down pacing of hard drug addiction, and builds suspense in a sweaty, premature, panic.
From the title down, Almond is written with all the subtlety of a trench coated pervert, nervously trying to blend in with the other parents as the school bell rings. The prose and the content and the characters and the narrative are so underdeveloped, and so amateur, that an explanation is needed. This is more than just a mistake, or poor trade craft. This is something much less forgivable.
It starts with a happily recycled theme in Korean literature: psychopathy. Always a young man, always an outcast, someone struggling and failing to understand the world of emotions. He is cold… and it shows.
And Sohn Won-pyung is unashamed to lay it on thick: our young man doesn’t frown, grimace nor smirk, is never touched by fear, survives by diligently following a behavioural check list (“When others smile → Smile back”), is ushered through life by an overbearing and financially struggling Korean mother (someone who naturally blames herself for her son’s medical issue), has an nice old grandma who calls him “a monster” (leaving the reader to think about how that word is stressed), and eats a bucket load of almonds in the hope that “the almonds inside my head would get bigger” (apparently they are the same shape as his underdeveloped amygdalae).
There is never a need to double back here, and think about the boy’s condition; the reader is instead drowned with information and told at every opportunity that “the evidence kept adding up”. That it does… because that is all that happens!
A teenager with a spare five minutes could sketch this out in their heads, and come pretty close to nailing the story as we now have it on the page. He plods through school in mediocre ways, until he meets another young man, who, surprise surprise has the opposite problem: too much anger and emotion pumping through his violent body. They meet in melodrama at the end of a chapter: “But the boy he found was nowhere near ready to meet his mom. Because that boy was Gon.”
The odd couple balance each other out. He then meets a girl, but lo and behold she is different, quirky, and not like all the others. She too balances him out. And again it is done so at the end of a chapter soaked in melodrama: “Panting, she stopped right in front of me and our eyes met. For five seconds at least. That was Dora.”
Almost every significant first meeting of characters happens with this literary tactic – with this type of language. And it’s by paying a little more attention to the author and her resume that we can begin to understand the necessary question: why on earth does this book look this way?
In the author’s own words: “I wrote the first draft of Almond for a month in August 2013, when my daughter was four months old. Then I revised the draft heavily for a month at the end of 2014 and another month in early 2016.”
Sohn may have applied a few late-term edits as she says, but it still reads with violence; a near criminal indifference to literature and readership. It reads like a book that took only a month to write!
But there is more to it than just clumsiness and haste. It appears that Sohn has a lot more experience with films than she does with literature, and with Almond hustled into movie theatres long before it had time to mature on bookshelves, things begin to make some sense.
It is an innovative idea, but one that you can only hope doesn’t catch on: why write a movie script and wait years for it to bounce around production companies, when you can instead first publish it as a novel, and make some money in the interim.
If you are somehow unfortunate enough to be on tenterhooks here, well Almond ends as it always would, with our young man discovering his emotional side in a grand and selfless gesture. Basically another vampire love story, a book for the young and the dumb…
…“Maybe it’s a puberty thing!”