The Three Sui Quash the Demons' Revolt: A Comic Novel Attributed to Luo Guanzhong

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The Three Sui Quash the Demons' Revolt: A Comic Novel Attributed to Luo Guanzhong. Translated and introduced by Lois Fusek. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010. Pp. xv + 299. US$49.00 (cloth).

Lois Fusek' s adept translation of the twenty-chapter edition of San Sui ping yao zhuan ... is a particularly welcome addition to the currently available examples of traditional Chinese fiction translated into English. The importance of this work to our understanding of early Chinese fiction was pointed out as early as forty years ago by Patrick Hanan in his essay "The Composition of the P'ing yao chuan" Harvard Journal of Asian Studies 31 [1971]: 201-19.) Although related to Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin through its putative author, Luo Guanzhong, the twenty-chapter version of The Three Sui Quash the Demons' Revolt is much less polished than the earliest extant editions of these two masterpieces of Ming fiction. Hanan suggested that The Three Sui Quash the Demons' Revolt might be "the best evidence we have for the first stages of the Chinese novel, as well as a prime specimen of the early vernacular language" (201).

Fusek's thesis about the deeper meaning of the novel, which she discusses in detail in the interpretive essay at the end of the translation, would seem to be somewhat at odds with a view of the work as comparatively unaffected by the revisions of a literati editor- on that point, more later. However, both Hanan and Fusek are united in their appreciation of the comic qualities of the narrative; united as well in their preference for the twenty-chapter edition over the forty-chapter reworking of the novel published by Feng Menglong in 1620, regardless of the fact that Feng's version is much better known. Both scholars observe that Feng attempted to bring the language more into line with the more elegant literary vernacular of the late Ming, and to rationalize the twenty-chapter edition by accounting for that edition's many inconsistencies. Nevertheless, they feel that Feng's revisions considerably lessened the lively charm of the twenty-chapter edition.

The core of both versions of the novel is a historical event which occurred during the Northern Song dynasty- an uprising in the city of Beizhou...