The lives in Susan Barker’s THE INCARNATIONS are ones that have existed a long time ago. Surreal and intimate, and brutal in their realism, they are really one life and one story --- one incarnated soul.

It’s 2008, and Beijing is set to host the Olympics. At its core, the city moves with the exhaust fumes from heavy trucks. Home to roughly 11 million, it is a congested, polluted landscape with an underground near Tiananmen filled with neon lights, restaurants, sexually explicit billboards, workmen cooking rice in gas rings, and constant movement. The people are always packed in, and the rain, dust and trade of the city are a perpetual fixture.

As a cab driver, Wang Jun is a silent observer. His customers treat him like a machine, hardly taking note of him. He hears conversations from young girls who have lost their virginity, investment bankers speaking about their profits, and witnesses prostitution daily. He goes through his 12-hour shift internalizing all these individuals. A quiet soul, he longs for transcendence --- his irony being his daily cab rides. He drives all around Bejing, but in essence he remains confined.

"Barker, who is as talented a contemporary author as I’ve read, shows that she may have much in common with writers like Italo Calvino and even fantasy authors like George R.R. Martin."

During one drive, Wang finds a mysterious letter in his cab; its initial contents are unknown, and, despite his best efforts, he can’t find the writer. The police don’t consider it a crime, and his co-workers state that they have nothing to do with it. Days later, he receives a second letter: “Once you were a Red Guard, rampaging through Beijing….” the letter reads, “intent on destroying the Old culture….months later I aided and abetted your suicide….but to know only your latest incarnation is to be only one-sixth alive.”

It is in the third letter Wang receives where THE INCARNATIONS becomes worth reading. Barker, who is as talented a contemporary author as I’ve read, shows that she may have much in common with writers like Italo Calvino and even fantasy authors like George R.R. Martin. Her ability to evoke a sense of place for an old country combined with mythic storytelling creates a sense of realism --- a sense of wonder and adventure amidst harsh places, where the brutish nature of conquerors and kings ravages the lives of slaves, concubines and eunuchs.

While these past lives are a highlight, equally as engaging is Wang’s own past. His birth mother died at the age of 14 while drowning in a river. When he first gets to know Lin Hong, his stepmother, he is cold and distant towards her. After his father catches the two of them in bed together, he is sent off to an asylum. He never goes back to school and instead becomes a cab driver. Barker adds another interesting facet throughout the book, blurring not just the line of sexuality but of family and relationships as well.

Perhaps the book’s only true flaw is its scope. The story itself is the incarnation of one soul over many periods of time --- that of Wang and the writer of the letters, his soulmate. Ultimately, we are reading about the betrayal and loss of that bond over and over --- in different periods of time and in slightly different settings. Although strong, well-rounded and mythic tales, they are a strange comforting dream with a very real underlying darkness. It is a world worthy of the soul’s exploration.