When I was 10 and would sit watching the campy high-kicking badly dubbed kung fu fun on the television I had no idea that it was based on anything older than the ideas of a few Japanese script writers and fight choreographers.
A 16th century Chinese writer, adapting folktales into one volume, might not have recognised television and probably would have been a bit offended by the ridiculous voices the voiceover actors gave to his characters, but he would have been able to see his text being followed surprisingly closely. This is a book full of humour and excitement, wisecracks and affection.
The story is as you remember it, if you remember it at all. A monkey god, born from a stone egg on a mountain top that had been caressed by the wind and the rain for hundreds of years, learns power and the secret of long life from a buddhist master and uses them to get a comfortable easy life of feasting for his followers.
He quickly bores of this cushy existence and his ambition takes him to heaven, where he’s given a job in the stables. He’s fine for a while until he learns the lowly status of his new role and rebels, causing trouble and smashing the place up. He’s imprisoned under a mountain until he learns humility.
While he’s trapped a brilliant young administrator makes a trip to his new province. He’s robbed on the way and his wife is kidnapped. Thinking he’s lost everything he becomes a priest and undertakes a trip to India to fetch scriptures that will restore peace ot the country. There’s a fish monster and a pig too. You remember, surely. That horse is a dragon, it turns out.
He goes, they get into scrapes. It ends well.
I enjoyed this book enormously, which was a great relief after approaching a few British and European folk stories with good intentions but ultimately finding them poorly written or, as tends to be the case with greek texts, repetitive to the point of unreadability. It’s a lot less goofy than 1970s TV but it was lovely to realise that they’d taken their sense of fun directly from the original.
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