KEY POINTS:
Mo Zhi Hong is a newcomer to writing. I'm glad of this, because when I read a book like this - essentially a coming-of-age story - a little light goes on in my critic-brain that says "autobiography?"
Not that it really matters. Many of the best books I've read have been thinly veiled reprises of the author's own life, and a writer striving to write what she or he doesn't know simply to avoid being accused of committing concealed auto-biography would seldom be likely to offer readers anything worthwhile.
Unfortunately for me, I'm not good at squelching an instinctive search-and-destroy urge when I think a story likely to be self-promotion, but confronted by a book whose author I know nothing about, I can let the instinct die a natural death. Of course, that means the book must stand on its own two feet.
The Year of the Shanghai Shark has solid feet. What I'm always struck by when reading books set in the cities of contemporary China or, for that matter, almost any other part of the world, is how familiar it all seems. The preoccupations of the book's late-teen protagonist aren't that different from my own, removed by thousands of kilometres and more than a whole generation.
Sometimes he seems committed to escapism in following the careers of celebrities or in meditating on China's relations with Japan, Taiwan and the West. At other times he's almost frantic in seeking out rewarding relationships with the adults around him.
Like a series of acts in a nightclub, various older brother/father figures appear in his life, provide him with a perspective into his own future, and then recede, usually as their own struggles take hold of them. The mentoring older male, often known as "gege", or older brother, is crucial to masculine culture in China.
There's a gambler, an odd-job man, an elderly xenophobe and a failed poet, along with a host of more minor characters. One of my main complaints is that, while these secondary characters are well realised, they're samey in one crucial respect - the lives of each resembles a Greek tragedy, so that by the time the third ersatz mentor succumbs to his own flaws and hubris, the reader is beginning to anticipate such a payoff and it loses its force.
This lends the book something of a dial-a-cynic quality and when I'm feeling uncharitable I expect that the relentless stream of failures that fill our young protagonist's gege-space have less to do with some point that the author is trying to make about the futility of struggle than with his fondness for repetitive cliche.
Or maybe he needs to see a shrink about the dysfunctional relationship with his own father. Happily, many a wonderful novel has been written about dysfunctional relationships with dads. Hong, furthermore, is able to dodge cliches more often than he gets sideswiped by them.
A non-linear narrative is suprisingly downplayed but is all the better for it. The origin of the novel's enigmatic title is a mystery the author uses sparingly but well to keep the reader moving forward with the story. And there's a real warmth, despite the uncertainties that surround the characters.
The Year of the Shanghai Shark is far from afraid to celebrate healthy relationships, and does it without descending into mawkishness. This is a book that tells us only a little about what it means to be Chinese, which may disappoint some, but says a lot about what it means to be a human, and that shouldn't disappoint.
I've read a lot of books about China. Even if I had not I would be able to say with some authority that China can be a very grim place. One doesn't have to set out to paint a bleak picture of life in China, particular for the young and the poor, to end up with a book that can get depressing.
Even a neutral look at China will reveal some dark corners. I mention this because Beijing Coma is the most depressing of the many books I've read set in China, and I want it to be clear exactly how strong a statement this is. While this book is too nuanced and frank to gain an endorsement from the China-bashing crowd who spit tacks at every acknowledgement of the Communist government, that doesn't make it any less strong a denouncement of the current political order in the People's Republic.
The author uses a dual narrative device, following the life of Beijing-born chemistry student Dai Wei through two periods of his life. We see him grow from a young man shocked by stories of his father's life in the prison camps of the Cultural Revolution to a student marshal during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.
During Tiananmen he is shot in the head by a policeman and spends the rest of his life in a coma, cared for by his mother, fully aware of what is going on around him. It's this comatose viewpoint, interspersed with the resonant adolescent experience of his younger self, that makes this book so grim. Every time the younger Dai Wei achieves something which seems to bode well for his life we are transported to the future where his future self is able to draw only frustration from remembering his past loves and successes.
I suspect that the author is using Dai Wei's torpor as a metaphor for the morbid status of Chinese civil society in the post-Tiananmen era. I couldn't blame anybody who didn't finish this book, because it was a downer. It's not designed to be anything else. At first I held out hope that there would be some form of happy ending or heroic recovery, but pretty quickly I realised that that would betray what the author was building towards.
But it is an intelligent downer, a thought-provoking downer, and if we believe the function of an artist is to hold up a mirror to reality, we can't really complain when reality turns out sinister.
The Year of the Shanghai Shark
By Mo Zhi Hong (Penguin $28)
Beijing Coma
By Ma Jian (Random House $36.99)
* Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a Wellington hist-orian and writer who has lived in China.
