Liz Bourke Reviews The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang

The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang (Tordotcom 978-1-25018-042-1 , $28.99, 496pp, hc) August 2023.

I freely admit I don’t know anything about The Water Margin, the classic of Chinese literature from which S.L. Huang explicitly draws inspira­tion for The Water Outlaws, except what I’ve just gone to look up. But The Water Outlaws is the kind of novel that made me want to go take a deep dive in its inspirations, so maybe I’ll finally get myself in gear to go read a translation of Shi Nai’an’s 14th-century classic.

The author’s note to The Water Outlaws out­lines Huang’s ambition to write a gender-flipped story of antiheroes against tyranny, mixing wuxia and epic fantasy, ‘‘rife with indecorous women and fantastical sword fights.’’ In this, The Water Outlaws succeeds in full measure – although I’m not sure that most of the band of bandit protagonists represent what some think of as ‘‘antiheroes.’’ They’re often a little more heroic than that.

Lin Chong is a Master Arms Instructor of the Imperial Guard, a civilian woman whose skills (and ability to pass the imperial examinations) have won her a respectable post in Bianliang. But there are only a handful of women in similar posts: society remains in general mi­sogynistic and repressive. Lin Chong is upright and honourable, impeccable in behaviour and reputation, unlike her aristocratic good friend Lu Junyi. Lu Junyi is a wealthy and progressive intellectual whose opinions toe right up to the line of what gets people arrested, and she thinks Lin Chong is entirely too conservative.

But everything changes for Lin Chong – and soon after for Lu Junyi – when a powerful Imperial Grand Marshal, the emperor’s friend Gao Qiu, takes against her. Lin is disgraced as a criminal, and when Gao Qiu’s attempt to have her executed fails, he turns to extralegal means to have her killed. But Lin is rescued from roadside murder by Lu Da, an immensely strong former monk with a magical artefact (a god’s tooth) that gives her access to even greater strength, and recruited by the bandits of Liang­shan. These bandits are a queer (in all senses) group of radicals, criminals, and outcasts who don’t see why corrupt and unjust wealthy men should get to keep all their riches when the Liangshan bandits could make just as good a use of said wealth. Lin, uneasy in their midst and at the machinations of the leaders among them, has nowhere else to go: she may as well make the best of it.

Meanwhile, Lu Junyi has come to the atten­tion of Cai Jing, Chancellor of the Secretariat, whose word is as good as law. Cai Jing is a sadist but nonetheless a loyal, effective servant of the empire, and he conscripts Lu Junyi into his effort to make more devastating weapons for the empire from alchemy, gunpowder, and the unstable material known as scholar’s stone: to make artefacts even more powerful than god’s teeth. (I’m a little uncertain of the plural. It might be gods’ teeth.) Lu Junyi finds her radical ideals peeling away under the threat of Cai Jing’s power, and the blandishments of potential imperial influence if she helps him succeed. Mostly, though, Cai Jing terrifies her. For entirely good reasons.

When Lin Chong and the bandits of Liang­shan steal a caravan’s worth of riches from Cai Jing, they offend a man whose response to offence starts with torture and mutilation and escalates to mass murder. The bandits of Liangshan have put themselves squarely in Cai Jing’s sights, and if they are to survive, they must counter both the military might he can muster and the new weapon that Lu Junyi has helped create under his auspices. Are they he­roes enough to stand? Or will the might of the empire bring them down?

Huang has written a gloriously cinematic novel, one that delights in martial arts tropes. The Water Outlaws’ bandits remind me a touch of the Robin Hood mythos, while being rather more complex and rather less straightforwardly heroic than many renditions of the Heroic Out­law myth often are. The novel zips along like a high-wire act, feeling faster and shorter than its nearly 500 pages, with characters drawn in vivid strokes. Lin Chong is an appealing, understandable protagonist: the honourable warrior backed into a corner, still trying to act as honourably as she can. Her sworn sister Lu Da is a much more straightforward, earthy kind of person: perhaps not as clever as some of her comrades, quick to emotion, but kind, with her own sense of what’s right. Lu Junyi’s character arc is a fascinating examination of a privileged person with progressive ideals find­ing themselves in a situation where their ideals point one way and most of their incentives (like keeping their lifestyle, or even their life) point the other. Other characters are sketched in a more impressionistic, but still striking fashion, and the convention of character nicknames helps the reader to keep track of the role each of them play in the Liangshan community.

There are points where The Water Outlaws leans hard into violence and brutality: there’s revenge-cannibalism, torture, mass murder, and attempted sexual assault. But in terms of tone, Huang chooses only to touch on darkness, emphasising high drama and adventure rather than the grim underbelly of a corrupt society. This choice keeps The Water Outlaws more of a rollicking ride than a depressing one, and I have to consider it a good decision, because The Wa­ter Outlaws is a hell of a lot of fun. I enjoyed it, and I really rather hope Huang decides to write a sequel. Maybe several sequels, if we’re lucky.

This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.

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