Yan bends reality to suit his satire
The ever-expanding town of Explosion in the novel is a microcosm for China as a whole, writes Steve Walker.
China has long agonised over how to treat its intellectuals. Like Ai Weiwei, Yan Lianke is both a thorn in its side and a cause for celebration. His biting satire, The Four Books was short-listed for this year’s Man Booker International Prize.
Yan is a caustic critic of China’s headlong rush for economic prosperity and its consequent costs. The Four Books savaged the regime’s industrialisation and its everincreasing demands on the land. Human lives and cultural values are crushed in the process.
The Explosion Chronicles sets its sights on the cult of size. A tiny village balloons into a ‘‘provincial-level megalopolis’’ to rival Beijing and Shanghai in a few years. That explosion comes at considerable cost in values and human rights.
Fuelled by ‘‘righteous indignation in response to the horrifying realities of contemporary China’’, Yan constructs his epic satire around the machinations of one family, the Kongs, who share their surname with Confucius.
In 1949, the patriarch, Kong Dongde, predicts that one of his four sons will become emperor. He survives through the turmoil of land redistribution and the Cultural Revolution from 1966. Meanwhile coal is discovered nearby. The villagers make money by pillaging coal from passing trains.
One son, Kong Mingliang, grows rich on stolen coal. It is he who will become emperor – as mayor of the megalopolis of Explosion.
Explosion’s growth is down to a combination of government incentive and local greed. Mingliang, a machiavellian schemer, exhorts villagers to strive for tiled roofs. Performance bonuses are exploited and the population gets rich quickly. The village is soon renamed a town.
The town soon acquires one brothel, then several more, all owned by Mingliang’s wife, Zhu Ying. The prostitutes are quickly dragooned into helping Mingliang’s efforts to convince inspectors and administrators to upgrade the city. Needless to say, it is he who becomes mayor at each stage of the town’s expansion.
Yan takes aim at the values trashed in the process of meteoric growth. In Explosion, bribery, fraud, vote-rigging, prostitution and theft are rife. There is even a statute erected to a thief, now labelled a ‘‘martyr’’. Explosion is thus a microcosm for China as a whole.
Yan’s style will be familiar to readers of The Four Books. He again adopts his own ‘‘mythorealistic’’ approach – a blend of realism with fantasy. Some of the seemingly fantastic events, however, are real: elderly people committing suicide to be buried rather than cremated, and thousands of dead pigs floating down a river are both recorded events in modern China. Yan bends the reality to suit his satiric aims: an airport is built in three days, over the human remains of peasants lost in the process.
Most satire works through sharp focus and brevity. Think Candide and Animal Farm. Yan, however, has here written an epic tale. Characters become mechanical constructs. Lost is a sense of the cost in human terms. Perhaps that is an outcome of the loss of human scale in the growth of Explosion.