Sun, Oct 14, 2001 page19

• China's history seen through the eyes of a foreigner

  First-time novelist Sid Smith may not have ever traveled to China, but you would never know it from reading his book

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  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.

  One man is bitter before his time, the voice of another is cramped by accent, and someone who falls on a mountain path is described as being a guest of the small stones. He describes a cat as follows: "It sat in the hot sun by their door and lice swam like dolphins through the fur of its head, seeking the night inside. It had a hidden necklace of ticks."

  He also knows a lot about the buffalo cult of the Miao (the sacred color of which is blue), and for the secret words of their funeral rites that cite nine scholarly sources.

  Interest is certain to focus, though, on Smith's material related to biological weapons. This is partly based on research into Japan's notorious Unit 731 and its experiments on prisoners during its occupation of northeastern, and less extensively eastern, China in the 1930s and 1940s. Victims were infected with several pathogens, including anthrax, and anthrax shells were also tried out.

  Recent political developments make it preferable not to go into too much detail here, but Smith makes the claim that more than 250,000 Chinese in 20 provinces were killed by biological warfare during Japan's retreat from territories it had occupied. He also refers to evidence that cholera might have been deployed against Chinese troops during the Korean War.

  In addition, Smith has a lot to say about the viability of race-selective pathogens -- diseases modified so as to affect only one particular racial group. This, he points out, has been made a real possibility following the completion of the Human Genome Project.

  He makes this relevant to his plot by creating a character who is writing a book attributing degrees of humanity to different races. One Miao girl is judged less than human, and as a result her death is considered less than murder. Smith points out that such ideas have a long history in China, as elsewhere, but also goes out of his way to insist that the Chinese are in reality no more prone to such pseudo-science than almost everybody else.

  This short novel is most unusual, most disturbing, and most absorbing. Walking out into the street after finishing it, you see the world with different eyes. If you read only one book about China this year, make certain that it's this one.

  Publication Notes:

  Something Like A House

  By Sid Smith

  216 pages

  Picador
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