“The smell of blood woke me.” And so Jeong You-jeong starts in the worse possible way, with trodden, nerve-dulling, cliché. It’s enough to stop even the faintest literary ear from reading further, and discard The Good Son after only one sentence. Without any claim to such an ear myself, I kicked on.

And it doesn’t improve much, at least not right away. Clumsy mistakes are one thing, but The Good Son consistently talks down to the reader. Prose is thrown, and then smeared, uncaringly on the pages. The dizzying haste of the writing process remains uncleaned, unedited, and exposed without shame to the audience, as if this, somehow, was the intention all along… and maybe it was!

Getting old, tired, and beyond the point of caring about status and judgement, the great novelist Kingsley Amis once told his son Martin (an established author in his own right) that he was finished with the highbrow side of literature. From there-out everything he touched was only going to be light and entertaining, it was only going to be thrillers and murder mysteries – “I am never going to read a novel again unless it begins with a shot rang out.”

This was also a kind, roundabout way, of telling his son that he wouldn’t be reading anymore of his books. Martin Amis’s prose was too wordy, too deliberately intellectual, and there was too much delight in the play of language; to the detriment of the story. Working around this, Martin would jump into the genre himself, writing his own murder mystery, London Fields, and even dedicating it to his father. Kingsley still wasn’t interested, and never opened a page.

It’s worth remembering who this is coming from: Kingsley Amis lived and died at the apex of literary sensibility. He wasn’t falling apart with age, he was just re-confessing to an old truth – that reading should be fun. But it doesn’t always need to be a blunt-force commitment in either direction. While reading in this way, Amis’s last ever book, The King's English – published posthumously – was a writing guide on the uses and abuses of the English language.

So Kingsley Amis might not have had a problem with Jeong You-jeong’s opening sentence, he might even have cheered in excitement, but as the pages of The Good Son trundled forward he too would have discarded the book as it began to fall short of his only remaining criteria for reading: entertainment.

Grand literary entrances like ‘a shot rang out in the night’ or “The smell of blood woke me” are skyhooks for the heavy lifting to come. An acknowledgement that the reader is going to have to endure something a little tedious, a very slow-burn before anything really catches light. All with the hope that enough is promised from that first sentence – enough to keep people there, smiling, and trudging forward, searching desperately for the flames.

But what then happens if the spark never catches? Or worse, when the author stares back at you without love or interest, and throws away her box of matches without ever bothering to drag a lazy piece of red sulphur across the striking paper; smug and convinced in her own light, from her odd angle on things, that, in fact, the room is already burning with incandescent colour.

The Good Son is an odd mess of dreams, memories, hallucinations, side-effects of medication, memory-loss, flashbacks, and conversations with ghosts. In doing this, the book also jumps between times, tenses and perspectives without natural or obvious breaks; language bleeds into itself almost as a stream of consciousness, leaving the reader to catch their own steps, backtrack, and search for where, and why, the change happened – doing the author’s job for her.

And when the pace of things is eventually broken – marking out four large chapters – it still serves no purpose as each chapter simply flows from the same place and moment where the previous one left off (the epilogue being the only exception to this). The writing rolls forward breathlessly, without pause, patience or structure.

Our young protagonist, Yu-jin, wakes up smelling blood, then he sees it also. The room, the house, his bed, his clothes, all red from whatever happened last night – and downstairs his mother is also covered, cold and murdered. Jeong You-jeong’s disconnected mind starts here, with an empty memory, an obvious crime, and the realisation that “clues to who had killed mother were all over the place”.

Immediately that disconnect, and the limitations of the author are there to be seen, and the few literary devices she has in her toolbox repeat so often that they suffocate the novel, etched into every turn and twist like a heavy, creeping, oily fog. Time stamps bounce back and forth across every paragraph and sentence – these are from a single representative page: “1:30am”, “1:31am”, “1:34am”, “12:10am”, “12:15”, “12:30am”, “12:30am”, “12:30am”, “1:34am”.

And instead of carefully sculpting the growth of intrigue and mystery, Jeong takes a sluggish shortcut and bombards her reader with a series of internal questions from the confused Yu-jin – these are from a single paragraph, if you can believe it: “she would have…”, “she would…”, “would she…”, “would she…”, “would she…”, “did she…”, “maybe she…”, “did she…”, “why didn’t she…”, “why didn’t you…”, “why did you…”, “why did Mother…”, “why would you…”.

At every turn Jeong fails that old clichéd rule of writing: ‘show, don’t tell’. Trust your readers’ intelligence. If the details and connections are there, then they will be found. An overlay of language re-announcing every small detail – “Things that had seemed unrelated to one another and the clues I’d shrugged off or ignored were beginning to come together” – is redundant, unless the narrative is also. It’s here where most of the troubles seem to hit: it never feels like what the author had in her mind is what we are getting on paper.

It’s a disease that burrows deep into the prose’s bone marrow. At this point the problem might be in translation – or more accurately with the translator – but regardless, it stings the tastebuds; on every page, at every turn, there is new disappointment, something which claws you away from the story, and into the laziness of the writing process. I challenge anyone not to cringe when, without laying any context, Yu-jin is saying things like:

“I would have to focus and trust my cheetah legs.”

When the words ‘seizure’ and ‘severity’ are allowed to sit next to each other in this sentence, crashing the sounds together.

 “I wasn’t anxious about the seizure severity”

Or take this as a complete, intact, and horribly conceived passage:

“Whose feet were these? A doll’s? A ghost’s? Looking down from above didn’t provide any answers. I had to figure out what was going on. I gritted my teeth and continued ahead.”

Where to start with this? First, why would anyone see human feet and think it is a doll or a ghost? “Looking down”, as opposed to what? The feet, as with the body, are of course on the ground. “Whose feet were these”, “I had to figure out what was going on”? Well take a step forward, turn your head, and mystery solved! Ordinary people don’t pause to think in moments like these, especially when the only feet they could possibly be are your mother’s (she’s the only other person in the house). And “Continued ahead”? It’s hard to conceive of a more non-descript choice of language (except, perhaps, when later in the novel, heavy rain is being called “adverse conditions”). No care or thought – in any way – has been taken for the possibilities of expression and evocation.

It’s impossible to avoid the thought that The Good Son looks like this, and reads in this way, because Jeong You-jeong never really believes - at any point - that her audience is along for the ride. The whole novel is thick with a rough, grainy slime. Nothing about it is compelling, thought provoking or polished.

But then, just like that, around halfway into the book – when most readers would have already given up – something happens. The prose and style remain frozen and manufactured, but the pigments around it all change, everything takes a new light; a little more interesting, a lot more psychopathic.

From here, in retrospect, some of those previous literary calamities aren’t quite so bad. The author’s internal voice isn’t as broken as it first seemed. And the constant lack of realistic emotion and human reaction begins to make more sense. It all just takes too long, and sadly, I imagine, most people will never get this far into the book. Too much endurance is needed for far too little of a payoff.

In another late moment of his life, Kingsley Amis was personally sent a copy of Julian Barnes’s then-newly released book, Flaubert’s Parrot. Hanging desperately for his feedback, Barnes eventually contacted Amis and asked what he thought. Amis casually replied that he hadn’t managed to read past the third chapter: “[I] might have considered plodding on a bit further if only one of the two chaps there had pulled out a gun and shot the other chap”.

Shin Kyung-sook doesn’t see it this way! Attached proudly to the back cover of The Good Son, is her endorsement: “This book will pull you in; as you devour it, you may find yourself”. I have often suspected that Korean authors feel a strange need to be kind to their contemporaries, to help usher in new voices, or to be nice to old colleagues. A community where everyone hugs close, helps each other with positive reviews, where nobody criticises mistakes, and where a protective shield is erected between writers and their words.

But even then, for Korea’s most prominent writer – someone with a sharpened understanding of trade subtleties – to say such a thing, about this book, stretches the mind in impossible ways. It’s enough to make you wake up smelling blood.