Mrs. Tung's presence influences Mae's behaviour; after a fight over the village strongman attempting to bamboozle her husband Joe of their land, Mae starts an affair with her neighbour Mr. Ken, Mrs. Tung's grandson, and falls pregnant. Mae is compelled to learn how the use the internet TV of her friend Kwan and connect her fashion business to the wider world. She teaches the people of the village how to use the TV, bringing the objections of the more conservative village members. She receives a grant to create a fashion business which exports local handcrafts to first-world buyers using the internet. Mae's connection to Air allows her to see the past, present and future, from which she sees a vision of a flood that will wipe away the village. The combination of her exposed affair, her continual warnings to the other villagers and the regular violent outbursts that occur when Mrs. Tung's presence comes to the surface results in Mae being ostracised, feared and concerned for by her neighbours and friends. Mae travels to the city with the support of her friends Sunni, Kwan and Sezen and is invited to visit "Green Valley Systems" by company head Mr. Tunch, who is interested in the curious circumstances surrounding Mae's connecting to Air and Granny Tung. Mae learns about the different proposed "formats" for Air, the larger struggle for format dominance, and how corporations like Mr. Tunch's want control of the format for their own power. Mae is held at Green Valley Systems against her will but eventually escapes with the aid of an experimental talking dog.
Back in Kizuldah, Mae patches up her relationships with her family. Eventually Mae's vision comes true and she leads the effort to rescue the people of the village when the flood comes in the early hours of Chinese new year's day. Gaining the respect and attention of her peers, when Air does finally come, her village is ready. She gives birth to her child into a brave new world and optimistically reflects on what the future holds.
Air is a fantastic story about the traditional ways of life confronted by the changing world and forced to adapt to survive. Ryman celebrates and criticises both the old way and new way of life such that the overall balance is somewhat neutral, a mix; the future is coming whether the residents of Kizuldah like it or not. The story is always told through the eyes of Chung Mae; we learnt about Air given Chung Mae's background and perspective, not our own, emphasising the strangeness of the modern world, it's bizarre terminology and it's distance from the life of Kizuldah. Mae is an interesting and multi-facetted protagonist; she is smart, caring and driven while also being erratic, vulnerable. It was a good choice to have a character like Mrs. Tung take up residence in Mae's mind; her memories and personality traits that are imprinted on Mae give the reader a rich perspective on the traditional way of life that celebrates its love and loss. Generally speaking the novel is full of very interesting characters, particularly the female ones, and vivid detail of the life of the village, it's poverty, festivals, social politics, working life. Although I thought Mae was a really well painted central character, I did have a bit of trouble at times trying to understand her motivations and what/why she was doing at some points. It also seemed odd that given the sacred nature of the history of the Eloi people to Kwan, she didn't object to Mae's business ideas for selling Eloi handcrafts. Was there some aspect of cultural appropriation worth exploring here, or perhaps that would be going too off-track from the central themes of the novel? Also, as raised in countless other reviews of the book, the abdominal pregnancy thing was a little bit weird; I was just never sure of what was the point of this; the symbolism was a bit lost on me (I mean I think a normal and more believable pregnancy would have got the job done all the same).
Overall, a really great book with lots of depth; definitely worth reading.
