Explosion a blend of realism with fantasy

The Explosion Chronicles Yan Lianke Cost: $37 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 ever-increasing 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 ‘‘provinciallevel 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.

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.