MCLC: The Four Books review

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The Four Books review
Source: Asian Review of Books (3/20/15)
The Four Books by Yan Lianke
Reviewed by Jonathan Chatwin
Having become used to his work being censored by the Chinese authorities, despite his own admitted self-censorship, Yan Lianke approached the writing of The Four Books with a degree of indifference as to its fate at the hands of the authorities:
I’ve always dreamed of being able to write without any regard for publication. The Four Books is (at least partially) an attempt to write recklessly and without any concern for the prospect of getting published.
Certainly—and even when compared to his fiercely satirical earlier novels Serve the People and Dream of Ding Village, which both ran foul of the censors—The Four Books is brutally uncompromising. Indeed, it is perhaps hard to conceive of a premise more likely to incur censorship in China than that of Yan’s novel, which tells the story of a group of nameless intellectuals, known only by their former profession, interned at a re-education camp during the years of the Great Leap Forward. The novel is constructed of excerpts from four books, ostensibly “discovered” by the author, which themselves allude overtly to a range of Western and Chinese texts, all guaranteed to raise the eyebrows and heartrate of a CCP censor.
These texts include the four canonical gospels of the Bible, the four books of Confucian thought, The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (as well as its antecedents) and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, amongst others.
The novel, as with Yan’s other works, has been characterized as a satire. In truth, however, though there are satirical exaggerations in the novel, not least an extended metaphoric side-narrative in which a character attempts to grow wheat by feeding the grain with his own blood, the facts of the Great Leap Forward are so absurd that they require little overstatement by the politically motivated novelist.
Fundamentally, the story of Four Books will already be familiar to those who have read Frank Dikötter’s definitive history of the period, Mao’s Great Famine or Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone and the novel takes a fairly linear structural approach, blood-fed wheat aside, to relating the years of absurd targets and subsequent famine, with all of its attendant horrors.
The central narrative conceit of the novel is its use of the multiple narrative voices of the “four books”. The novel opens with extracts from an anonymous manuscript, written in the style of a creation myth and drawing heavily on Christian imagery, titled Heaven’s Child. The bulk of the narrative, however, is told by “the Author”, an inmate at the camp, in extracts from two separate texts composed by him: Criminal Records, a journal which records the behavior of other inmates, commissioned by “the Child”, the shadowy character who rules over the camp and whose name suggests both his naivety in the face of authority and his ultimate self-sacrifice; and Old Course, a novel which the Author writes secretly during his time at the re-education camp relating his individual experience.
The novel concludes with an extract from the introduction to A New Myth of Sisyphus, an allegorical reintepretation, written by another inmate at the camp, of the story of the deceitful king of Greek mythology, condemned to forever push a boulder up the same slope.
The range of allusions in The Four Books, in particular those to Sisyphus and the New Testament, encourage one to view the novel’s story as somehow allegorical of a universal experience of human suffering, a perspective affirmed by the interned intellectuals’ lack of proper names.
The novel ends with a suggestion that in the furnace of such brutal experience, individual contentment can be forged, though it is ultimately unclear whether this contentment emerges from enlightenment—or simply submission to an authority whose power is absolute.
Dr Jonathan Chatwin is a British writer who has lived in, and written on, China. He is the author of Anywhere Out of the World: The Work of Bruce Chatwin.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 20, 2015
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