Owlish is a curious novel that the reader really has to work at, and whose subtle beauty can probably only be appreciated at the end, and through rereading Tse's afterword. Some things are clear: the fictitious city-state she describes is a cipher for Hong Kong and the repressive regime put in place by the Chinese. Equally, Owlish owes a clear debt both to Kafka and to Murakami. For the former, the protagonist Q (not K) tries to penetrate and navigate through a mysterious and unfathomable bureaucracy where surveillance plays a clear role. In respect the latter, things are not always what they seem, bordering on the surreal. Q forms a love or fetishization for a mannequin doll that comes to life, perhaps it's a distraction (or a representation) given all the other changes to civil liberties occurring. Tse's point seems to be that "to be able to move is one kind of freedom; to be able not to move is another" (page 184). We need to avoid sleepwalking into the disaster – per Hong Kong – where "the streets are unpredictable and the people strangers, where you might at any moment run into some unknown dream vision of yourself" (page 215). A call to arms. 7/10.
By Dorothy Tse