The problem of the genre for anyone looking for a genuinely original book is the same one they encounter when reading Orwell's lively classic — everything quickly becomes predictable. Thus you know in advance that the tyrants, both petty and not-so-petty, will eventually become engaged in in-fighting, one Red Guard faction battling another just as Orwell's Napoleon and Snowball were certain from the start to end at each other's throats.
And the invariable ending of Cultural Revolution horror stories is always the same — the Death of Mao. Finally the pressure is off, the lovers of Western literature can at last bring their old paperbacks of David Copperfield and Les Miserables out from under the cowshed and file applications for entry to elite universities, their natural home.
No-one today, in China or elsewhere, wants to deny that the Cultural Revolution was a nightmare. What they might want, however, are new books about something else, and the reason for this is the reason why all new things get born — the old ones have become tired, their tropes endlessly repeated, their subject-matter exhausted.
Fortunately Nature sees to it that the new does eventually win through. The finger-waggers who insist we mustn't forget the lessons of China's Red Guards (and the depths to which humanity can fall) die off, and the young, while in no way wanting to praise the Chinese revolution's most virulent phase, simply turn their attention to other things.
The finest literature is almost invariably written at the start of something, initiating fashions rather than following them. Shakespeare's Hamlet was penned a bare 10 years after English drama as a vital force first appeared, and yet there hadn't been a comparably energetic and wide-ranging play written anywhere in Europe since Roman times (Japan was a different matter). Late-flowerings are possible, but by and large the newest things are the best, let the moralists and graybeards say what they will.
It's a bit of a pity to have to write in this vein about Emily and Larry's cautionary tale because on the whole it's better than average for its genre. Unfortunately, however, it appears when that genre is approaching the end of its allotted span.
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