Simon McDonald

Susan Choi’s Flashlight clocks in at almost 500 pages. It felt like twice that size. I love a doorstopper novel; a story you’re going to invest days in, maybe a week; the excitement of a richly embroidered multi-generational saga. But this was dense as mud. I trudged through it, stirred onwards by the premise rather than its ponderous execution.

The opening is such a tease. It promises so much. One night, on a beach in Japan, Louise and her father Serk are walking along the shore by the beam of a flashlight. Then—somehow, the specifics of which are revealed (much) later—they both end up in the surf. Louise washes ashore, alive, but only just. Her father’s body is never retrieved, and he is presumed drowned.

From this moment, Flashlight expands backwards and forwards in time as Choi drills deep into the inner lives of Serk, Louise, and her mother, Anne, as well as decades of geopolitics. It’s sprawling, which is fine, but moves so glacially, and sometimes not at all, stalled under the weight of its aspirations. Momentum is obfuscated by dispensable meanderings. Every crescendo dwindles into a whisper.

This was such a frustrating reading experience. I don’t actually mean to savage it as I have—Flashlight contains passages that sparkle, and many compelling moments. But it’s never a good sign when you’re constantly checking how many pages you’ve got left in a novel, eager to move on to something else.