This is a novel by a young British writer set in modern China. As if that wasn't startling enough in itself, it is also a minor masterpiece.
It begins with an act of writing. Old Li, a provincial Party Secretary, hears that the local rocket assembly plant, the heart of his community, is to be closed. It's a cold but bright winter day, and in the slanting light of morning he sits down at his desk, takes out brush and paper, and pens a set of inflammatory, virulently anti-communist slogans. These he fixes to his balcony. Then he twists a bed sheet into a rope and hangs himself.
The publication of this book is a major event. It is, for instance, a far finer piece of work -- more poetic and more movingly evocative -- than Ha Jin's (
By and large, when an inexperienced writer first sets to work on a novel there are two things you can reasonably expect. It will probably be autobiographical, and it's likely to be stylistically diffuse, as if the young writer is still flamboyantly flexing his authorial muscles.
This novel conforms to neither of these expectations. It's efficiently plotted, it describes an emotional world remote from the author's personal experience (though the setting of provincial China is one he knows from having worked there), and it's written with great power and poetic sensitivity.
Consider this, for example, as a description of the ubiquitous red, white and blue fabric used to make so much plastic sheeting in China. "Red for the Communist Party," writes Hill, "blue for the sky; white for death, winter snow and the unwritten page." When you come across a sentence like that early on in a book you know you're in safe hands, and that there are fine things in store. It would not be reading too much into this passage to deduce that the author will be concerned in equal measure with human society, nature (including life and death), and the ancient craft of fiction.
This is a beautiful book. Reading it is like discovering an early novel by D.H.Lawrence. It has strength and gentleness combined. The relationship between a tired, drained mother and her son is inevitably reminiscent of Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. A former communist, but also a victim of the Red Guards, she recovers a moment of her youthfulness when he brings home a Ming dynasty cup and tea-pot her son has bought at an antiques shop.
"`There were many bad things in Old China,' she said, `but we had such pretty things too.'" In fact, the book's essential theme is recovery of the memory of the past, albeit largely the years immediately following 1949. Previously in China, questions had seemed dangerous things, but now the younger generation is beginning to ask them anew. And as the events of former years begin to take shape for the young, so they do for the reader.
The son, for instance, is now a rich man after a series of business deals in Guangdong Province. But in his youth he had been involved in the 1989 student movement, and had, as a result, spent time in prison. Now he is in a position to arrange a large investment deal for the very police officer, a former school mate, who had him arrested.
His parents have been in labor camps too, forced to confess to sins they couldn't make up fast enough, but that were never sufficient to satisfy their interrogators.
The small town that makes up the setting of the story has changed as well. Whereas earlier there had only been political meetings and demonstrations, now there are nightclubs and karaoke bars everywhere. The only problem is that the factories are closing, and there's no work on offer.
Yet this isn't primarily a political tale. Nonetheless, many of the things about contemporary China that one reads about in generalized accounts are presented here in the lives of individuals. But the emphasis is invariably on the human concerns of the victims -- a man's worry over whether his wife in a neighboring camp has enough to eat, a woman's concern over whether she'll have enough money to clothe her child.
But it isn't a depressing book either. Families in cramped housing units may lament the years of life they have missed, but the book is often funny too, and there's enough sex in it to keep the most debauched reader happy.
There's a sub-plot, for instance, in which a 19-year old girl, the child of an dysfunctional family, has her first affair. It's not as simple as that because there's some clever inter-linking with other strands of the story. But it would spoil some of the immense pleasure the book contains to give any more away.
More importantly, fragments of classical Chinese poems are often introduced into the text, and these give unexpected relief from what's generally an ugly setting. But Hill, as well as being both a lover of poetry and himself a poet in prose, is also a remorseless realist, and contemporary China is clear-sightedly delineated on every page.
A book published in its original language almost invariably makes easier and more convincing reading than a translation. This is not to say that The Drink and Dream Teahouse isn't a strong story, with gripping events and a compellingly interesting cast of characters. It's all of these things. But its linguistic naturalness is also such that, all things considered, it's the most compulsively readable novel set in modern China I've ever read.
This claim may involve some loss of face for China's own novelists. But this book looks at China from an emotional distance, and as a result it achieves a roundedness that perhaps comes more easily to an outsider.
Inevitably you can't help wondering if there are any plans afoot to translate it into Chinese, and that having been done, what Chinese readers themselves will think of it. There's a major opportunity here that Taiwan's own energetic publishing houses shouldn't let pass.
But make no mistake about it, Hill has all the hallmarks of a major writer. We will be hearing a lot more of him, and with luck before very long.Publicatio Notes:
The Drink And Dream Teahouse
By Justin Hill Weidenfeld & Nicolson
344 pages
Available from FNAC Hardback
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