MUSIC OF THE REVOLUTION
Madeleine Thien’s Booker-listed novel is a threnody of China’s troubles
MADELEINE Thien was barely 15 when she was gripped by the momentous 1989 Tiananmen Square protests as they unfolded on the TV screen of her family’s home in Canada. But it was the unresolved questions from her acclaimed 2011 novel about the aftermath of Cambodia’s revolution, Dogs at the Perimeter, that compelled her, some two and half decades later, to embark on the ambitious undertaking that is her new and third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing. “These two novels are deeply connected,” says Thien, who views both as an attempt, in part, to track what has happened to her generation.
Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, Do Not Say We Have Nothing is at one level a saga about a family of musical prodigies whose lives play out against the tumultuous ructions of China’s revolutionary history. At another, concedes Thien, “it is a profoundly political novel”. A work that, as she infers in her acknowledgements, can be read as alternate history. How history is recorded and erased is a potent theme in this beguiling novel, which begins in 1989 with its narrator, Marie, a Canadian mathematician who also answers to the name Li-ling or Girl, recalling that fateful year when she was 10. The year in which her father, Kai, a once famous pianist in China, killed himself, and she and her mother obsessively watched CNN’s coverage of the events in Tiananmen Square.
But it is the revelations gleaned from a door-shaped notebook found among Kai’s papers, The Book of Records, that is to lure Marie to China many years later, in an adult quest to understand her father’s suicide. A quest seeded that same year of Tiananmen, when her mother shelters a young Chinese dissident, Ai-ming, who recognises the writing in The Book of Records as belonging to her own father, Sparrow. For Marie, as for the reader, this tract serves as a portal onto both her father’s secrets and that of Ai-ming’s brilliant composer father, Sparrow. Cannily mirroring time-honoured forms of covert communication, The Book of Records is like a melodic underscore to this illumined novel, opening onto an entire landscape of stories within stories and packing a subversive punch all its own.
Born in Canada to Malaysian Chinese immigrants, Thien knew she wanted to write by the age of 10. She first won acclaim for a collection of short stories,
Simple Recipes (2001), followed by her 2006 debut novel, Certainty, then Dogs at the
Perimeter (2011), which won the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 LiBeraturpreis. But not even that novel can prepare you for the power, intensity and emotional reach of Do
Not Say We Have Nothing. In writing it, Thien charged herself with addressing “the gap between what language can express and the profound depths of what people experienced. Something that I feared I failed to do with Dogs at the Perimeter. Just the ways in which selfhood, family, identity and lives were torn apart wholesale, and feeling that a lot of that couldn’t be expressed in language, led me to think about the musicians in China, what it was that they felt they could express only through the language of music”.
Indeed, music is a palpable melodic force in this narrative, which is deftly anchored to the lesser-known details of that other great force, China’s revolutionary history. But for Thien, who has punctuated her narrative with fragments of text from other books, it is above all, “a book of books and this idea that on the one hand there’s the ideology which creates its own revolutionary language that everyone has to utilise. On the other, there’s this long history of literature and poetry which is also instilled in people, and in which they see shattered reflections of themselves in a cyclical pattern, returning again and again”.
Already at work on a new “very different” novel, this 42-year-old author admits that for her writing is a quest to find a moral way to live. “Asking what that moral life could be in the space of our regular day-to-day lives is difficult for, say, someone like me, who lives mostly in Canada. But there is a very thin curtain separating you from where you could be living another kind of life, because you look around society and you see that there’s no place for certain people, certain histories or even certain bodies,” she adds, softly. “And I just feel that literature can pull that curtain back.”
Music is a palpable melodic force in this narrative