'Oracle Bones' touches parts other books can't

This is an outstanding book, quite possibly the best general book on modern China to have appeared in the last few years. The author is a 38-year-old native of Missouri who's been freelancing in China since 1999, mostly for The New Yorker. His first book, River Town described his life teaching English in the Sichuan Province. Oracle Bones is his second book, and it spans the whole of China, in place and time.

Hessler's aim is to show the country through the lives of ordinary individuals. But he also has academic interests - in history, ethnology and especially in the evolution of written Chinese. So the book's structure is a loose assemblage of varied experiences - preparations for the Beijing Olympics, filming in the Gobi desert, visiting the North Korean border, life in Shenzhen, even a trip to Taiwan - but with continuity provided by the changing fortunes of key individuals. Added to this is the evolving story of the discovery, interpretation and preservation of the oldest existing examples of written Chinese, the inscribed divinatory fragments known as oracle bones.

The book holds the reader tenaciously with this two-pronged approach. You settle down to it knowing you'll find something new and intriguing, but also anxious to find out how a former student is getting on with his girlfriend, or how an Uighur drinking companion is faring as a wheeler-dealer immigrant in Washington DC.

The book opens with the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. No one he meets believes it was accidental - how could an advanced country like America make such an elementary mistake? The author warms to a young Uigher money-changer in Beijing when the youth challenges a restaurant full of angry Chinese by asking why, if the US was so advanced and so malicious in intent, it only managed to kill three journalists? The pair walk out to stunned silence. The Uigher goes on to fly to the US, armed with doubtful documents, and successfully claim political asylum.

Hessler studied English Literature at both Princeton and Oxford, but he wears his learning lightly. Sometimes it shows, though, as when he's sleeping out in a guardhouse on the Great Wall in a sandstorm and echoes the ending of a famous story by James Joyce. But his tone is everywhere self-effacing and quietly ironic, so you're not surprised that he doesn't point out the reference specifically, any more than he gives away any details about his personal life.

Hessler's great strength is being open with everyone. One moment he's listening to a taxi driver, the next he's interviewing the greatest American authority on Chinese characters. He observes elections in Taiwan and (at village level) in China with equal interest, though it's obvious where his sympathies lie. Democratic Taiwan is "an experiment, an experiment for the mainland," Hsinchu's then vice-mayor Lin Cheng-chieh (林正杰) tells him. Also in Taiwan, he discusses the author Edward Said with Sisy Chen (陳文茜).

But his real purpose in coming to Taiwan was to talk to the now-deceased archaeologist and scholar Shih Chang-ju (石璋如) at Academia Sinica. In 1936, Shih had overseen the excavation of the largest cache of oracle bones ever found in China. Hessler particularly wanted to ask him about a figure who constitutes another thread running through the book, the Chinese archaeologist Chen Mengjia (陳夢家).