In traditional Mongolian society, it was believed men and wolves worshipped the same god, Tengger, to such an extent that the dead were left out in sacred sites specifically so that wolves would devour them. This was still happening in China’s Inner Mongolia in the 1960s when this gripping novel is set.
It’s essentially a story of man and animals based on a close observation, and eventually a close understanding, of the interrelation of the two species, and indeed of most of the other inhabitants of the traditional Mongolian grasslands. Lu Jiamin (呂嘉民), who writes under the pseudonym Jiang Rong (姜戎), was sent to Inner Mongolia in 1967 as one of the despised student intellectuals banished to the countryside to learn the honest ways of the soil. After 11 years he resumed an academic career in Beijing, and only published this fictionalized version of his experiences in 2004. It won enormous acclaim, with over a million copies circulating in China, won the first Man Asian Literary Prize last year, and now appears in a new English translation by master translator Howard Goldblatt.
In the terminology of modern ecology the book, though everywhere an exciting adventure, is a tribute to mutually sustaining ecosystems, with man as both overseer and central player. The itinerant Mongolian hunters see the wolves as threats to their sheep, yet at the same time understand how their depredations control the teeming gazelle herds that would otherwise consume all the precious grass on which their sheep depend. Thus the wolf is simultaneously hunted and worshipped, and when the central character, the Chinese student Chen, decides to capture and raise a wolf cub to study its nature, and perhaps later cross-breed it with domestic dogs, the Mongolians, who’ve never attempted such a thing themselves, look on with a mixture of doubt and interest.
But in the author’s eyes there’s much more to the wolf than this. It’s the ultimate hunter, he argues, and it was from wolves that the ancient Mongolians learned their unique skill in war. He answers the old question of how it was possible for a small population of hunters from the East Asian steppes to establish the world’s most extensive empire, conquering territories stretching into Western Europe, and also defeating the far larger and better-supplied armies of China, by saying that it was because they’d learned their military strategy from the planet’s most intelligent predator, the wolf.
From this develop some fascinating comparisons between the psychology of the farmer and that of the hunter. China has been dependent on rice-cultivation and an agricultural life for 5,000 years, Chen argues, and has lost the craftiness and nimbleness of mind of the hunter of the grasslands. This is why the Mongols were able to defeat the Chinese and establish their own imperial dynasty, even within China itself.
But the argument doesn’t end here. The author (always speaking in the person of the student Chen) also explains the superior technical achievements of the West in similar terms. The Westerners were always closer to their hunting ancestors than the long-civilized Chinese, he claims, and for this reason were able to dominate and exploit China until very recently. Whereas the Chinese maintained a hierarchical social system under their emperors, reflecting their successful but unchanging agricultural round, the West had remained competitive, pressing forward to such things as social mobility and democracy, because of their closer links to the wild. The difference could even be seen in the games of children — cooperative and friendly in the case of the Chinese, aggressive and competitive in the case of the not-inappropriately-named “barbarians” from the West.
Tragedy strikes the grasslands when technicians and marksmen arrive from Beijing intent on exterminating the wolf population and settling the land with migrants from the south who will raise sheep in pens and live, not in traditional Mongolian yurts, but in red-roofed houses complete with wide-screen TVs. The world of capital accumulation and the year-end bonus had arrived.
This is presented, surely rightly, as a man-made ecological disaster — mice, once the wolves’ prey, proliferate, the intensively grazed grass turns to desert (with its sand routinely blowing south into Beijing, not so very far away) and the rivers drying up. This may please enemies of China’s relentless modernization and its tendency to apply one system to many different situations, and indeed this book’s arguments, explicit and implicit, could equally be applied to Tibet. But tragedy only surfaces in the book’s final pages. Wolf Totem is in essence a superb and engrossing open-air adventure in a setting that’s vanished — though it survives, apparently largely intact, in Outer Mongolia.
Grassland lore is everywhere in this book — thoughtful passages on swans (sacred to the Mongolians), horses, hawks, vultures, marmots, rabbits, larks — even mosquitoes — proliferate. The intelligence of all living things is central to this culture, although it’s an almost entirely meat-eating one. Crawling out of the icy Mongolian sunlight into a wolf’s cave, howls across the steppe in the bitter night, horses and gazelles encircled and then savaged even as the hunters look on — this is a bloody but astonishingly vivid world. Only fish are left curiously undiscussed.
Howard Goldblatt, the man generally agreed to be the world’s finest translator from Chinese, and who has a Taiwanese wife, also a professional translator, called this a “magnificent novel.”
As you’d expect, his English version reads smoothly and frequently thrillingly, and individuals are well-characterized through their speech, though Jiang includes no major female character. But this is a masterpiece anyway, simultaneously wise and enthralling. It’s hard to believe there was a more compelling contender for the first-ever Man Asian literary award.
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