China Dream

By Ma Jian Vintage, 192pp, £12.99

This latest novel from Ma Jian, a writer banned in his native China, is another blistering attack on the current ideology and political practice of the People’s Republic. It tells the story of a provincial Party leader, Ma Diode, a man of backhanders and endless mistresses, who is director of the China Dream Bureau, a real body tasked with rolling out propaganda for the China Dream initiative of President Xi Jinping. The Dream is meant to be a vision of prosperity, of individual fulfilment harmonising with communal purpose, but it emerges here as the worst of both worlds, a vision both cruelly autocratic and emptily consumerist. In the fictional version of the Bureau, Ma Diode plans to develop a microchip to be inserted into all Chinese brains to expunge the nightmares of recent Chinese history, but his mind cannot hold back the horrors of his own past, and gradually the flashbacks take hold.

The story gathers pace as Ma Diode tries to hold onto his sanity, juggle his mistresses, and keep the demons at bay. It’s a wonderfully well-paced narrative, absorbing, darkly satirical and even funny at times.