Anthrax as an agent of biological war is one of the subjects dealt with in Something Like a House, an unnerving yet strangely beautiful first novel. Though the book was published several months ago, it couldn't be more of the moment. But the fact is it doesn't need any such fortuitous aid to celebrity. It is the most interesting, carefully worded, and provocative novel featuring the Chinese world I've read for a very long time.
The story follows Jim Fraser, taken prisoner from the British army at the time of the Korean War. He stays on in China for another 35 years. He becomes one of the peasants, wearing baggy trousers and torn canvas shoes and lives in an impoverished Miao village in a hill district that has been officially closed to foreigners since the time of the Japanese invasion. He witnesses the Cultural Revolution, and even for a time becomes a Red Guard. Eventually he gets involved in secret work on germ warfare being carried out in a nearby town.
The author, Sid Smith, turns out to be something of a mystery. The publishers describe him as having been a garbage collector and construction site worker. Today he works as a sub-editor on both the Times and Guardian newspapers in London. There's no mention of his ever having been to China.
In an afterword, Smith himself cites several published accounts as authority for the events he describes, as if the entire narrative is the product of research. But it is inconceivable that this extraordinary novel could have been written without first-hand knowledge of the country. Working with Chinese porters, watching archaeological digs in a mountain cave, handling the hardship of life in a Miao house where the windows are waxed paper and the door a mattress stuffed into a hole, improving on aspects of Miao agriculture -- all this and more can only possibly be based on direct experience.
One of the books Smith credits is John Gittings' Real China, and he thanks Gittings for reading this novel while it was still in manuscript. Gittings catalogues the unbelievable horrors of the Cultural Revolution, and Smith says that he agrees with him in finding many incidents too gruesome to describe.
In the absence of hard information, I would guess that Smith knows China in relatively recent times, and has relied on authorities to fill in the historical background and to confirm his own observation of the lifestyle of the rural Miao.
As regards the horrors, Smith limits himself to cannibalism, after which he draws the line. It's well known that some of the populace in ancient China valued the blood of executed prisoners, especially if they were celebrated criminals, as bestowing strength, and maybe even giving them male children.
Smith records that of 526 killings by Red Guards in one county in the summer of 1968, internal organs were removed and eaten in 75 cases. In the novel, a crowd watching prisoners being pushed towards their place of execution moans in anticipation when a victim with some renowned special quality, and so likely to yield big medicine, appears.
On the other hand, the book contains many moments of beauty. This combination of horror, statistics, and an understated poetry is very characteristic of Something Like a House. (The title, incidentally, refers to Fraser's impression of one of the characters of his Chinese name). Smith's prose favors the terse and the sardonic.
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