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In attempting to review and even editorialize on translator and scholar Arthur Waley’s edited version of Wu Cheng'en’s (1505-1508) Monkey: Folk Novel of China, the most larger fact is that this book is beloved in China and I lack any of the proper background to speak on it in any other than how it struck me. Normally I would have avoided an edited version in favor of the full text, but I barely made it through this one.

Monkey reads like a cycle of stories intended for children. Bed time stories many be fables or even a collection of fairy tales representing variations in the local stories about the central figure . What slowly emerges is that this is clearly intended to be something of a comedy, or satire on all such kinds of story telling and almost an in your face take down of more formal and didactic children’s or even camp fire adult stories. I just kept getting bogged down in it repetitions and near total lack of dramatic tension. Nothing is ever going to best Monkey even if it takes 500 years for him to get back on top.

The character of Monkey is a , well impossible to classify. He was born of a stone, making him a rock head. His primary form and allegiance is to his fellow monkeys and apes. In his early adventures he becomes a student to a very powerful monk and from him learns some magic that will make him impervious to almost any other being, monster, demon, demi god and almost all of the gods. For much of the first part of the book nothing will defeat him, his hard head or his magic weapons. One being a toothpick that he can magic into any size needed. Tooth pick to battle staff, gotta love the whimsey.

Note to anyone designing a super hero, at some point being undefeatable gets dull.

Somewhere around the middle Monkey gets religion, albeit one with a lot of latitude for, excuse me, Monkey-shines. With his friends , including a converted demon, Pigsy ( yup a magic pig) they go on a classic, or not quite so classic pilgrimage, from the emperor of China into very far away India to collect Buddhist holy books.

All of this is in the courtly style of Chinese literature, with courtly style trash talking between enemies and phenomenally precise counts of how many sub demons an adversary can muster, how man bouts it take to subdue an enemy and how many layers of the heavens have been penetrated. Throughout Monkey is a trickster as well as a warrior and a medicant. Somehow it is hard to ever take him too seriously.

Mostly likely Monkey was written to be read as a series of bed time stories or as occasional topper in high society drinking cum story telling events. Clearly it fits more into an oral tradition of story telling more than as a sit down read. As a sit down read, I found it too long, too repetitive and however clever our anti hero Monkey tricks his way to victory, it became a slog.

Likely real scholars of early Chinese literature will find my comments more frustrating than the book deserves. I accept that this one may have required a finer sense of cultural respect than was in me. It will not keep me from attempting other and longer of the Chinese classics.