Book Review: Tiger Season
Tiger Season: A Novel of Korea.
By Gojan Nikolich.
Black Rose Publishing.
Publication Date: October 31, 2024. Kindle and Trade Paperback.
Pages 355; Word count 115,000.
Review by Marssie Mencotti (aka Marcella Bernard, author of Pro Patria: The Story of an American Who fought for Italy in WWI).
If you love intelligent text and value the rich subtext of superstition and magic within a violent time of conflict, this book is for you. If you are in awe of human connections that are life and afterlife-changing, read this book. It is a riveting read and a rollercoaster of unexpected action, depth of character development, and plot twists. In this affecting story lies selfless humanity, realism, mysticism, abuse, joy, gore, surprise, sharing of food as love, brutality, fear, a fearsome big cat, and always in wartime, a multitude of rats.
This is a book I could not stop reading. It is lovingly and temperately written with chapters and paragraphs just as short or long as they need to be to keep the excitement sizzling. The reader always feels that the story is pouring out and not forcibly constructed. Nikolich’s language is sometimes poetic and always painfully clean, peaceful, and clear. This is a well-written and satisfying book and describes a few events similar in style to Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller); e. g. the descriptions of the strange “meetings” between Korean and American military leaders with their twisted dysfunction and the intransigence of their discourse.
In a beautifully painted word portrait, Nikolich introduces the tiger face to face: “She sat with her whiskers incandescent in the glow of the flashlight, her eyes scarlet, and regarded Profar with almost snobbish indifference. As if his visit had been expected and he was not at all what she’d hoped for. She made that odd chuffing sound, not threatening at all. It sounded like a polite greeting.”
Nikolich succeeds in positing many points of view of the Korean situation in 1968: the serious soldiers, the displaced Koreans, the underclass of indentured women, the petty bureaucrats, the rabid North Korean infiltrators, the inflated military leaders on both sides, the crude and dangerous enlisted men, the medical shortfalls, the venereal diseases, and of course, the natural force of the tiger in Korean mythology and in the DMZ. He lets us decide whether those points of view are meaningful when the characters are making their decisions.
SP 4 Eddie Profar and his partner Pvt. Yevgeny Lee take their shift on the edge of the DMZ and while on patrol find the aftermath of a very unusual event. The soldiers are “high” and through this haze, decide not to tell anyone about it because they suspect a tiger has been involved and no one would believe them. This event beginning with a lie grows into a complicated situation and the sense of lurking danger never lets up.
Pvt. Lee at first seems to be a character providing comic relief. He speaks incessantly about his reincarnations as a soldier with Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and other leaders and how he died every time in ignoble ways only to return to another conflict. He not only presents a metaphor for the continuing hubris, futility, and stupidity of acquisition through war but also his past life experience renders him valuable as a source of experienced advice.
Nikolich tells us about Jia, the beautiful girl for hire who has been thwarted in her efforts to get to America. In a concise and thorough chapter, Nikolich shares her traumatic story of escape so we do not lose sight of the fact that this land and its dearly revered ancestors were the Korean people’s bedrock for millennia and the shocking separation from their history during this conflict was something profound and terrible. A nefarious character named Choi-Il-Seong, the owner/manager of the bar and brothel at the Army base, states, “You do not understand that we are one nation and two states. We are two unfinished nations made so by an unfinished war that has turned us into incomplete human beings.”
Through it all, SP 4 Eddie Profar remains true to himself and his friend Pvt. Lee as they share information with their major, sergeant, and general and struggle with keeping some secrets back. The mistrust among all the characters that live on the base with its bars and redlight district managed by Choi runs deep. Eddie, Jia, and Pvt. Lee know that somehow, they are connected. We come to realize all the characters are trapped and troubled. It is the brilliant but natural way that the author moves and removes them from their situations that mystifies us. They are bundled into a “karass,” the novelist Kurt Vonnegut’s term for a team of people, singly or grouped, that drifts in and out of a person’s life but all collaborate unknowingly on a greater plan. What each character does or doesn’t do profoundly affects the others. In this way, we as readers are immersed and invested in their every decision.
I am trying to identify a singular emotion that mesmerized me while reading Tiger Season. I believe it’s the feeling that as we see much of the world through Eddie Profar’s eyes, it is a world that never makes sense. His view of humanity as generally more good than bad is always being questioned and puts him in a state of indecision about how to progress. He stands outside of life, tracking the changes while reading the signs and observing life moving around him. He rarely takes direct action because of this studied quest. He watches, he considers, he sits, not in judgment of others so much as in self-judgment of what he can reasonably affect and whether the danger outweighs the risk. Then he makes his move. You must read this book to find out what happens. The last 100 pages will knock you down like a 500-pound tiger.
