Ha Jin: The Crazed

By PAT BASKETT

The inscrutable Chinese eye that stares mesmerically from the cover of this book is a symbol for the story - at least from a Western reader's point of view. It begins with a straightforward statement of fact: Professor Yang has suffered a stroke. The narrator, Jian, one of his students and the professor's future son-in-law, is assigned to sit with him in the hospital every afternoon. It's spring 1989, a few months before the student uprising in Tianamen Square. Knowledge of this event hovers unsettlingly over the pages.

Yang's stroke has partially paralysed him but left him able to speak, which he does volubly and in a way that is profoundly disconcerting for his listener. His first outpouring is a curious version of the Genesis story in which God grants Man 10 extra years to his lifespan. These years come from the monkey and donkey who have requested that their miserable lives be shortened by that amount.

This strange story has to be seen as a parable for the way Man has messed up Creation, for the political and moral confusion that continues to wreck people's lives in China.

Sitting at his bedside, Jian discovers aspects of his revered teacher's life that destroy his image of him as the devoted scholar and virtuous family man and, in turn, undermine his sense of his own destiny. They also discuss literature and the differences between Chinese and Western traditions.

Towards the end Jian sets off with other students to join the uprising in Beijing - as a way out of his own personal confusion rather than from political persuasion. It's personal interests, Ha Jin writes, that motivate the individual and therefore generate the dynamics of history. So much for ideals.

The violence that Jian encounters on the outskirts of Tianamen Square is recounted with an immediacy that is almost shocking after the cool tone of allegory that has kept the reader searching for meaning - for the truth behind that inscrutable eye.

Jian is not convincing as a character. His assertions of love for his fiancee have a hollow ring and there's a strange fastidiousness in his descriptions of how women are dressed.

Ha Jin has lived in the US since 1985 and is a professor of English at Boston University but his language is that of a non-English speaker. Despite this, Ha Jin writes from the inside and the reader is drawn inexorably into the narration of an unhinged world of uncertainties and ambiguity.

William Heinemann

$34.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.