Book review: The Fat Years

CHAN Koonchung's novel The Fat Years has been called the Chinese 1984 and the Chinese Brave New World. It bears some relation to both these novels, but the comparison shouldn't be pushed too far.

The Fat Years

BY CHAN KOONCHUNG

Doubleday. 307pp 12.99

The China of Koonchung's novel is not a distant dystopia, it is with us here and now. The book was written in 2008-9 and is set in 2013, two years into "China's Golden Age of Ascendancy" which began after the second global financial crash in the first weeks of 2011. (We seem to have avoided this - so far, and only just). But there is a curious gap in memory and history. A month has apparently disappeared.

According to the official line, the Golden Age of Ascendancy began on the day of the financial crash. But actually it started a month later, and all records of weeks of panic, shortages and rioting have simply been expunged. This is the starting point of the novel, and it's a provocative and intelligent device, a means to get the plot moving. The unanswered question about China is whether its new economic success, which has made so many of its citizens rich, can continue to be combined with authoritarian government and the repression of dissidents. It is this question which Koonchung explores.

The narrative is in different hands, presented from different perspectives. Much of it is carried forward by Old Chen, a successful novelist and journalist. Taiwanese by birth, long resident in Hong Kong, he is now living in Beijing. For two years he has been experiencing an unaccustomed happiness.

Everything is going so well. Life is agreeable - he strolls to take his morning latte in Starbucks and browses around bookshops before eating lunch in a good restaurant. It is agreeable to be part of the bustling life of this marvellous city and have a share in this Golden Age. Only one thing is missing. For two years he hasn't been able to write anything. But it doesn't really matter. He has done his work and is content.

Then he meets a couple of old acquaintances, one of them a woman, Little Xi, whom he fancied more than 20 years ago when the student dissatisfaction that would lead to the killings in Tiananmen Square was festering. She is now on the run, a suspect person who has spent time in a mental hospital, and is regarded by the authorities as a subversive. Her offence is twofold. First, she believes that China should be governed by law rather than by the Party; second, and more importantly, she refuses to be happy, and cannot understand why everyone seems to be living in a state of euphoria. Don't they recognise reality?

The other old friend he meets, Fang Caodi, is worried about the missing month. Why does nobody remember it? How can history be rewritten in this way? Doesn't this make the Golden Age of Ascendancy a fiction imposed on the People? Their concerns and questions begin to disturb Old Chen, forcing him to begin to look below the surface and examine the nature of the state he is living in. Is it all a dream which may turn into a nightmare? Yet how can this be so when everyone, except this handful of malcontents, is apparently so happy? There is only occasional disorder. There is no terror. A few people may disappear, but generally the Party prefers to accommodate the dissatisfied. Even underground Christian churches can do deals with the regime.

The narrative ranges widely, with some first person narrators, some passages in the third person. We move often out to Beijing to more distant provinces (a map would have been helpful) as Koonchung offers us a panoramic view of this vast country. It moves back and forth in time too, trying to make sense of the country's history since the Communist revolution. Most western readers will find much that is new and enlightening.

In a dramatic stroke, the small group of sceptics kidnap a Party leader and subject him to interrogation. In the last very long section of the book he expounds the Party's philosophy and view of history. This passage is flat, didactic rather than dramatic; it might be considered an artistic mistake, akin to Tolstoy's arguments about the philosophy of history in War and Peace. But it is of course essential; it is what everything in the earlier, often very lively, narrative has been leading up to: the exposition of the ideology of Power. The Party has abandoned socialism and embraced a market economy. But this itself has to be controlled and directed. Vast change has been accepted, so that there can be no essential change. Nothing must be allowed to threaten the supremacy of the Party. And the justification is that of all tyrannies: without us there would be chaos.

The style of the translation by Michael S Duke is matter of fact, workmanlike, journalistic, without flourishes or vivid phrases. This may well be faithful to the original; I have no idea. It has this merit: it makes for easy reading. This is important because, though there are many fine, and a few moving, scenes, and the various characters are brought convincingly to life, the novel is essentially intellectual. It puts the question: is it enough for a society to be generally content, if that contentment is based on lies and the denial of freedom of expression?

The Fat Years was banned by the authorities, but has reportedly become an underground success, passed from hand to hand and read, it is claimed, by millions of Chinese citizens. This would suggest that discontent simmers. Meanwhile, anyone who wants to understand modern China should read this novel.

l Chan Koonchung is at the Edinburgh International Books Festival on 25 August.