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| The Dark Road by Ma Jian – review | The Dark Road by Ma Jian – review |
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| Although best known as an exiled dissident defined by his head-on opposition to virtually every aspect of mainstream Chinese politics, Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the past 30 years. The brilliance of his 2008 masterpiece, Beijing Coma, was already anticipated in Red Dust, his atmospheric travel memoir, which recounted the young intellectual's spiritual and political escape from the capital to the west of China in the 1980s. Subsequent fiction such as The Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue developed a style that blended internal landscapes with flashes of magic realism and surreal comedy. | Although best known as an exiled dissident defined by his head-on opposition to virtually every aspect of mainstream Chinese politics, Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the past 30 years. The brilliance of his 2008 masterpiece, Beijing Coma, was already anticipated in Red Dust, his atmospheric travel memoir, which recounted the young intellectual's spiritual and political escape from the capital to the west of China in the 1980s. Subsequent fiction such as The Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue developed a style that blended internal landscapes with flashes of magic realism and surreal comedy. |
| The Dark Road is an angrier, more openly confrontational novel than its predecessors. Set in the river towns and vast waste sites that line the banks of the Yangtze in Guangdong province, it tackles the grim issue of forced abortions and sterilisations with a prolonged and unflinching gaze. | The Dark Road is an angrier, more openly confrontational novel than its predecessors. Set in the river towns and vast waste sites that line the banks of the Yangtze in Guangdong province, it tackles the grim issue of forced abortions and sterilisations with a prolonged and unflinching gaze. |
| The novel's ill-fated heroine, Meili, is born into a simple peasant family and, typically of uneducated girls of her background, marries while still in her teens before giving birth to her one authorised child, a girl, Nannan. But her schoolteacher husband, Kongzi, is a direct descendant of Confucius, whose nickname he shares, and he is desperate to produce a male heir to continue his family's distinguished line. Meili falls pregnant again, with spectacularly bad timing: family planning officers are roaming the countryside implementing a new wave of measures with almost gleeful savagery. The young family is forced to flee the village, eventually joining scattered groups of vagrants along the banks of the Yangtze, drifting from one town to another as itinerant labourers while dodging family planning officers. | The novel's ill-fated heroine, Meili, is born into a simple peasant family and, typically of uneducated girls of her background, marries while still in her teens before giving birth to her one authorised child, a girl, Nannan. But her schoolteacher husband, Kongzi, is a direct descendant of Confucius, whose nickname he shares, and he is desperate to produce a male heir to continue his family's distinguished line. Meili falls pregnant again, with spectacularly bad timing: family planning officers are roaming the countryside implementing a new wave of measures with almost gleeful savagery. The young family is forced to flee the village, eventually joining scattered groups of vagrants along the banks of the Yangtze, drifting from one town to another as itinerant labourers while dodging family planning officers. |
| Much of the wry yet affectionate humour that characterised the earlier novels, even one as obviously political as Beijing Coma, is absent here, replaced by an unrelentingly bleak atmosphere that is rendered all the more stark by Flora Drew's precise yet agile translation. The novel opens with several scenes of shocking violence, in which the women of Meili's village are subjected to horrific cruelty by family planning officers. In one angry confrontation between peasants and officers, a scuffle breaks out and a recently aborted foetus is trampled upon in the ensuing melée. These opening passages could be intended to prepare the reader for what lies ahead, for at virtually every turn, women are brutalised in one way or another as bloody foetuses are carried around in plastic bags or boiled in Cantonese restaurants to make male-tonic soups. | Much of the wry yet affectionate humour that characterised the earlier novels, even one as obviously political as Beijing Coma, is absent here, replaced by an unrelentingly bleak atmosphere that is rendered all the more stark by Flora Drew's precise yet agile translation. The novel opens with several scenes of shocking violence, in which the women of Meili's village are subjected to horrific cruelty by family planning officers. In one angry confrontation between peasants and officers, a scuffle breaks out and a recently aborted foetus is trampled upon in the ensuing melée. These opening passages could be intended to prepare the reader for what lies ahead, for at virtually every turn, women are brutalised in one way or another as bloody foetuses are carried around in plastic bags or boiled in Cantonese restaurants to make male-tonic soups. |
| It's not easy to endure the relentless stream of misfortune and suffering that afflicts Meili and her family wherever they go. The desperate world of migrant workers, many of whom are also on the run from family planning officers, is filled with tragic encounters that cumulatively read like a catalogue of every scandal to afflict modern-day China. Toxic industrial waste that has turned the famous Yangtze as "red as Oolong tea"; chemically produced fake milk powder; watermelons injected with growth hormones; mouldy rice milled with wax and resold as new; corrupt party officials; the ill treatment of the mentally ill – these horrors fill the pages of the novel, snuffing out any traces of optimism, such as Kongzi's furtive efforts to grow seasonal herbs and Meili's fleeting yet tender encounter with a man in search of his drowned mother's corpse. It is as though Ma is forcing the reader to experience the same harshness faced by migrant workers; but at the same time, Meili's unfading innocence and faith in humanity make us long for a conventional happy ending, even if we suspect there isn't going to be one. | It's not easy to endure the relentless stream of misfortune and suffering that afflicts Meili and her family wherever they go. The desperate world of migrant workers, many of whom are also on the run from family planning officers, is filled with tragic encounters that cumulatively read like a catalogue of every scandal to afflict modern-day China. Toxic industrial waste that has turned the famous Yangtze as "red as Oolong tea"; chemically produced fake milk powder; watermelons injected with growth hormones; mouldy rice milled with wax and resold as new; corrupt party officials; the ill treatment of the mentally ill – these horrors fill the pages of the novel, snuffing out any traces of optimism, such as Kongzi's furtive efforts to grow seasonal herbs and Meili's fleeting yet tender encounter with a man in search of his drowned mother's corpse. It is as though Ma is forcing the reader to experience the same harshness faced by migrant workers; but at the same time, Meili's unfading innocence and faith in humanity make us long for a conventional happy ending, even if we suspect there isn't going to be one. |
| The novel is at its provocative best towards the end, when Meili and her family reach Heaven Township in the far south of the country, famed for its lax approach to family planning as well as for its concentration of factories that feed China's economic boom. All of Ma's skill and playfulness are on display as the novel builds to a climax in which Meili is forced to question her very right to exist in this fragile, ever-changing new world. | The novel is at its provocative best towards the end, when Meili and her family reach Heaven Township in the far south of the country, famed for its lax approach to family planning as well as for its concentration of factories that feed China's economic boom. All of Ma's skill and playfulness are on display as the novel builds to a climax in which Meili is forced to question her very right to exist in this fragile, ever-changing new world. |
| • Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire is published by Fourth Estate. | • Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire is published by Fourth Estate. |
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