If a criticism must be made of Ma Jian's devastating and powerful attack on contemporary Chinese oppression, elegantly translated by his wife Flora Drew, it lies less in the writing and more in the society described. Jian, who researched the novel while posing as an official reporter in the backwaters of China, depicts a terrifyingly random world in which the "one family, one child" policy of population engineering is stuck to with such rigid adherence that mothers-to-be can be seized, taken to down-at-heel makeshift clinics and forcibly aborted, often at extremely late stages in pregnancy.
A matter-of-fact depiction of such an event occurring to the protagonist Meili, a young teacher pregnant with her second child, early on is one of the most distressing and horrendous scenes in recent literature, and the shock is all the greater for the cool detachment with which Jian describes it; the punchline, in which a weak and bleeding Meili, foetus dying in front of her, is informed that she has been given a half-price discount on the fees that the compulsory abortion would cost is worthy of Swift or Orwell in its bracingly bleak satire.
However, if you can handle Jian's unsentimental account of oppression, a warmer and more human tale begins to unfold, concerning Meili, her pompous former schoolteacher husband Kongzi, who sets great store by his tendentious family descent from Confucius, and their daughter Nannan as they travel down the Yangtze in a bid to escape the authorities who would unfeelingly exert the most extreme kind of habeas corpus against Meili. It is his wronged but noble protagonist with whom Jian has the greatest degree of empathy, allowing her enormous dignity in her desperate attempts to evade both the forces of the state and the more intimate domestic oppression of Kongzi and, as the narrative progresses, she becomes almost an allegory of the abiding strength of the individual set against a harsh and unfeeling world.
If this all sounds unspeakably grim, it's also worth noting that Jian introduces welcome notes of humour (especially in the matter-of-fact characterisation of the travellers they meet on their odyssey, many of whom seem blithely unbothered by the deprivations of the world they inhabit) and in the occasional depictions of the unborn spirit of Meili's dead child, a beautiful and graceful evocation of how, as Larkin put it, "what will survive of us is love".
