Comment on Crater

The writer Ning Ken said that desolation is the core of Crater. Such a serious topic is full of literary elements. Whatever murder, exploration, or suspense, sex, it absorbs everything. Ning Ken is obviously familiar with classicists and detectives. The desolation of Crater is the combination of loneness and darkness, which is deep in the heart of main characters and spreads to an extensive scope.

Crater takes a multi-line narrative structure, in which the story of private detective Su, and the story of the master of Jane's manor occupy the center. The detective Su goes into the manor to write the biography of Ms. Jane, which is the knot, bringing the narrative to come together. Ms. Jane is where all the contradictions point to. What she did and what she values affect many narrative context, and also witness the root of desolation s and suspense without answers.

Jane's manor, a green pastoral built on the barren wasteland, is the hard work of Ms. Jane who pursues environmentalism and the Holy Land for recreation and habitat in the eyes of many suffering from the noise of the city. However, the new detective Su reveals the terrible fact buried under the quite manor. In the eyes of outsiders, it is contradictory and illogical for Ms. Jane to do so, while in fact, the worship of nature and crime in human society are simply the same thing for Ms. Jane. Naturally, such a crime is only a legal argument, but in the perspective of Ms. Jane, this is nothing but punishment for evil and dirtiness.

If evil can be divided into “mediocre evil” and “extreme evil”, Ms. Jane is the latter, because she does not just go with it, but creates a set of careful and distorted concept and law and regard herself as creator and punisher. In real life, she suffered setback, thus self utopian dream arises spontaneously. If you limit utopia to dream, it may bring an extension of human mind, but once someone is dedicated to putting it into practice, it will almost inevitably become a big tragedy. It is common in history, and Jane's manor is no exception. Utopians are characterized with a strong desire for a perfect world without any flaws. Driven by the so-called noble ideal, they do not hesitate to take extreme measures to eradicate defected things to make their own territory pure and chaste. Ms. Jane is a typical utopian. Her green countryside is filled with quiet harmony of nature, but atrocious ecology in the Chamber of Secrets is Ms. Jane’s punishment for human sin. It seems a paradox, but is completely in line with the logic of a utopian. The Manor is eventually exposed to the world, and the legal punishment eclipsed its glorying appearance. Past utopian practice made the whole country crazy and drunk. Some waking people are too weak to control the situation. In afterward reflection, its harm is always been covered and belittled. It is indeed strange and harmful for the future.

Ms. Jane is a utopian, of course, yes, but she is also a real patient, ("Ms. Jane is not the devil, just a patient, second to no one"). She is the beneficiary of political power in her early years, but something is lurking inside, ready to break out. Emotional trauma is the blasting fuse which brings loneliness and darkness out of her. The result is the creation of Jane's manor. Ms. Jane is an ill patient in modern city, who is not strange to us. As those factors are more or less hidden in the heart of us, Ms. Jane leaves the last word before death: "I will wait for you in Crater."

It is said that the novel is not based on nothing. It is adapted from what Ning Ken heard in a trip with his friends. Triggered by a point, he is able to write a novel, which proves his sensitiveness and awareness. Though Crater is not created intentionally, as an attempt it is also not a bad idea. In fact, no matter what shell it has, its overall chaos, gloom, split in values and desolation express themselves between the lines.