Sid Smith's unnerving but strangely poetic debut novel, Something Like a House (reviewed in the Taipei Times Oct. 14, 2001), won both the UK's Whitbread First Novel Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was a mesmerizing story featuring biological warfare research and Chinese theories about race and genetics, set against a background of life among the minority Miao peoples in the 1960s.
What particularly surprised some reviewers was Smith's assertion that he'd never been to China. He still hasn't, but his new novel is once again set there, and once more on the upper reaches of the West River. This time it's the early 20th century, and a missionary couple arrive to bring the gospel to the local fishing and opium-growing communities.
Talking to Sid Smith by phone earlier this month, I asked him how he first became interested in the Chinese world.
"I was reviewing popular science books for London's Time Out magazine," he said, "and maybe half of them were about evolution. I soon got fed up, and wanted instead to write a novel on the subject. At first I was going to set it in the southwest of the United States. But when I read that the Chinese had their own distinct evolutionary theories, very different from the Western ones, then China seemed the right place to begin.
"Most people in the West think of mandarins, Confucius and long fingernails when you mention China. I wanted to show something different, and when I also came across information about biological weapons research and the life of the upland Miao, it seemed like a killer combination, and the more interesting way to go."
In A House by the River the missionary wife, Grace, though herself half-Chinese, is the more devoted of the couple to the Christian story. By contrast her husband, John, is attracted to the river fishermen's way of life, and so quickly becomes tolerant of their animist religious beliefs.
The pace of the action picks up half way through the book when John runs off down river with a village girl, and Grace heads out on a trip to preach to the opium-growers. She becomes convinced, through bizarre reasoning about some Chinese written characters, that China had originally worshipped the God of the Old Testament, but had turned away from the faith. China is "ancient in evil," she comes to believe.
"A friend of my wife's was at the time both a Sinophile and an evangelical Christian," Smith said. "He first told me about the theory that the Genesis story is hidden in some Chinese characters. It was in a London pub, and he scribbled down the characters on a scrap of paper. It's a belief that's been around for over a century, apparently. I thought straight away that you could build a novel around this idea."
Smith, who's now 53, has had a checkered career before finding success as a writer.
"After I left grammar school I worked briefly for the Inland Revenue [the UK tax office]. I hated it so much that they got rid of me, thank God! Then I spent seven years doing laboring jobs, mostly in Devon in southwestern England. Anything was better than working in an office.
"I was reading poetry a lot at that time, and anything else I could get hold of. Then when I was 26 I enrolled to do a degree at the University of Bangor, in North Wales. But I soon got fed up with the Eng Lit nonsense. The only bits that matter about literature are the ones you can't talk about, why this or that is beautiful and so on, not who influenced who."
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