Water and light are born of all things- commenting on Lin Zhao's "Tidal Chart" 丨 New Power

Lin Zhuo is a new name. The name only really took shape in 2019, with the publication of the novel "Flowing Creek" in "Harvest". However, the emerging writer Lin Zhao made a remarkable move, and "Tide Map" is Lin Zhao's second novel after "Flowing Stream". At the beginning of the novel, under the gaze of the author's "mother", a female giant frog named "Fiction" is born. Subsequently, in the river of words full of the regional style of South China, she set off from the Pearl River Water House, roamed the Thirteen Lines of Guangzhou and the Haojing Garden of Macao, and was eventually sold to Europe to die. In the meantime, the map slowly extends its arms and hands, slowly expands, history and fiction are hidden from each other like a dense jungle, and various characters are vivid, accompanied by giant frogs walking in time, and finally form this "fictional" fantasy journey that is given real life.

At the beginning of the story, what catches the eye is the flow of smart words, and Lin Zhao has constructed his own grammar in the "Tide Chart". Inspired by the Cantonese-English dictionary "Tongshang Zihui" and a series of "Chinese Trade Paintings" collection, the flintstones are suddenly polished, and combined with the dialect experience of the Pearl River Basin, a Tower of Babel, which belongs to South China, stands magnificently, forming the skeleton of the work. A large number of detailed materials constitute vocabulary, based on the rich history of Guangzhou and Macao in the first half of the 19th century, and are tightly covered with grammatical rules. The carrier of language flow is the first-person narrative of the giant frog. The giant frog devours and learns everything, the world in the book is thus illustrated in order, in the same way, the language has the same generativeness, with the change of geographical location, the change of the national identity of the characters appearing, the language style of the novel naturally changes subtly between the three chapters, which is also the result of the giant frog's learning. The complex, leafy and continuous growth of the language may make everyone who is far away from the South Sea and still uses "simple" grammar feel a sense of separation, but the smooth, flowing but effortless writing of the whole book will make the reader can't help but be pulled and persuaded by the turbulent language.

Aided by language, Tide Chart exudes a unique spiritual temperament, which is the key to the novel's fusion of abstract imagination into vivid and concrete stories. Since the birth of the giant frog, the boundaries of imagination have been outlined, Lin Zhuo once mentioned that the protagonist of the novel was originally a woman who also lived in the first half of the 19th century in the first half of the 19th century in the first person narrative, but she would therefore "act at all times and everywhere, unable to use the body and action to promote space like the men of the same period." Although the giant frog is a female, but the limbs are strong, calm, the big arm is stretched and free, with abundant curiosity and keen perception, these incomparably exuberant life features expand the imagination space of the novel, bringing out a whole "natural history of the sea skin", and also naturally contemplating the actual prototype, the specimen-made zoo elephant Didy, the brave fishing but forever hungry cormorants, the black and white cows that hand over milk, freedom and everything - through the eyes of the giant frog, these animals that have been used and squeezed by human beings are equally stated. Further, not only natural winds, small sand tsui, but even man-made sampans have been infused with life, and shelves have multiplied into warehouses, and so on, and so on, under the weaving creation of their common author "Mother", showing the orientation of the novel to the center of humanity.

The respect for the life of the wind and things is expanded, and it is the enthusiasm and care for the region. Although the map unfolded in the novel is vast, spanning ocean currents and continents, internally, the only spiritual field that serves as the origin is the Pearl River. The Pearl River is not only a simple flowing river, it indicates the time that belongs to life and civilization, and it is a living creature that is infiltrated by the signs of human life, everything, climate and breath. The Pearl River is thick and broad, which can be measured by the footsteps of novelists, and can also allow the events of novels and characters to be freely woven into life. If "Tidal Chart" is a letter written by Lin Zhao to the Pearl River, then it can only tell the story of the giant frog, and the inexhaustible Pearl River itself lurks in the shadows, providing an endless source of creation. In modern society, under the Pearl River, which is illuminated by the neon lights of the city, there is also a traditional, approaching tropical, vibrant, flowing through history, Lin Zhao collects its peeling shell fragments, but is not eager to restore, but fictionalizes a juxtaposition space to place the giant frog and its travels, but a hidden part of the Pearl River is infused into it.

And what makes all this come true is the various characters that the giant frog knows. Although the protagonist is in the shape of a giant frog, between the lines, it seems to be the dignity of a human being. As a fiction, she originally knew nothing and had nothing, and even opened the chapter to discuss the existence and intervention of the author, which was a tool for the author's manipulation, but on this "nothing" paper, it was the characters in the book who slowly gave her human feelings. This human feeling is not sophisticated, nor is it a distinct emotion and selfish desire, but a person's intellect and man's posture in the face of fate. The various characters who have accompanied the giant frog in the novel have also completed their fate in the journey of the giant frog, just like the language, their vivid and three-dimensional various images, in the face of fate, also infected the giant frog step by step transformation, growing into a human. The giant frog is afraid and loves Qi Jiajie, afraid of her illness and death, and afraid that she will not die but suffer in the human world; the painter Feng Xi can be regarded as the giant frog's first human "friend", and eventually go away by boat; the lady in the garden is gorgeous and incomprehensible, waiting for the giant frog to be raised like a baby, so that she can learn to walk upright, dress, and lady etiquette, and the Garden of Good View eventually collapses; the white naturalist H is skilled in making specimens, obsessed with naturalistic classification, and he also found the giant frog in Guangzhou, took him on a journey, and went around. The giant frog also witnessed his bankruptcy and suicide after the Opium War; Diagao became a prisoner of the "World" with the giant frog, and as a keeper, he sympathized with the other animals in the zoo, and eventually froze to death next to the giant frog... In the dense language, the uncomplicated plot of the novel is more turbulent because of the language, and with the passage of it, it is also a heavy fate cause and effect, all of which show an irreversible slow downward trend, or decay, far away, and dissipate. However, there are still winds and languages that grow luxuriantly, and the fire that burned down the Garden of Good View and the Sam Pa Tong in Macau before the naturalist H committed suicide was also a warm outburst, and the life of the giant frog slowly ran out over time was nothing more than that. In fact, the giant frog's journey across the river and the sea sounds like it overflows with freedom, but it is actually a story about captivity. The giant frog was hung on a large mast on a ship in the Ancestral Hall of the Pearl River, captured by H and James in the reed bamboo forest, braggedly kept in captivity in the Garden of Good view, and sent to the Imperial Zoo for exhibition, and after escaping to bay town, the last time of his life was spent in the old bath of another naturalist. Finally, her body was sealed in ice, and the ice cubes disappeared in the giant package, leaving only the cold temperature. Throughout her life, the giant frog has been looking for a name for her, defining her in various forms, either in complicated English, or simply "Bay Town Giant Frog", and the giant frog himself has been looking for nothing more than going back to the beginning, a "fictional thing, an animal that has not yet been fixed", how to complete his life.

Some extraction of traditional novel writing methods, the integration of local customs, spectacle geographical features and rich historical background, in the process of reading, readers are also like the giant frog, led by "fiction", into a giant frog, or any animal, southern plants, into the intertwined and connected all the wind, into a weak, forgotten characters, but can feel the real core wrapped in fiction. Feng Xi said to the giant frog before he left: "To make a big river, make a boat, make a frog, don't keep a ration in place, and the building will become a ration in the same place, and it will be cut off and eaten by others." In a way, the act of reading a novel is itself satisfying the instinct of life's destiny to embark on a journey. When we are gradually captured by certain single values, when we gradually become accustomed to graphics and fast food, when we are disappointed in the language itself in countless moments, disappointed in the shallow meaning under the language, and unable to use language to drive thinking, there is a language that can get rid of the ground, get rid of the trivialities of reality or the unbearable heaviness, shake off the complexity of stale and boring pretense, and create an incredible, lively and lively world that can be used for people to hide, explore, and think, which may be "Tide Map" As a novel, this genre has a current significance.