#publisher alternate (BUTTON) Close Skip to main content sign in * Saved for later * Comment activity * Edit profile * Email preferences * Change password * Sign out subscribe search dating more from the guardian: * dating * jobs change edition: * switch to the UK edition switch to the US edition switch to the AU edition International * switch to the UK edition * switch to the US edition * switch to the Australia edition The Guardian * home * › culture * › books * art & design * stage * classical * film * tv & radio * music * games * home * UK * world * sport * football * opinion * culture selected * business * lifestyle * fashion * environment * tech * travel browse all sections close Fiction in translation The Four Books review – satire from a Mao-era labour camp Intellectuals are collected in a re-education camp during the Great Leap Forward for a novel that leaves the reader with a profound sense of the power of ideology Peasants in the Chinese countryside in 1967 recite lines from Mao’s Little Red Book before starting work. Peasants in the Chinese countryside in 1967 recite lines from Mao’s Little Red Book before starting work. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images Xiaolu Guo Saturday 4 April 2015 09.00 BST Last modified on Wednesday 15 April 2015 13.51 BST * Share on Facebook * Share on Twitter * Share via Email * Share on Pinterest * Share on LinkedIn * Share on Google+ * Share on WhatsApp The work of the Chinese author Yan Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention – to write is to risk the hand of power. The Four Books is an Orwellian satire of life in a re-education labour camp for intellectuals during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. In District 99, one area of a sprawling re-education complex, no one has a real name. Yan’s protagonists are simply the Musician, the Scholar, the Author, the Theologian. Their days involve gruelling physical labour. They are exhorted to inform on each other’s deviant behaviour. Their supervisor, the Communist party personified, is called the Child, and enjoys his system of reward and punishment. As the story develops, the novel touches on a forbidden topic in contemporary China – the Great Famine of the late 50s. Misconduct in food distribution and unbalanced industrial production, fused with natural disaster, produced a staggering death toll – officially 15 million, but independent historians surmise it was closer to 36 million. The novel gives us a strangely abstract, almost disembodied idea of human suffering; it is depicted as an all-pervading atmosphere, from which neither religion nor human love can offer any escape. Reading The Four Books isn’t an easy undertaking, but it is richly rewarding. The English translation comes across as quite precise and poetic to me, a native Chinese speaker. I was hoping to find an original version in Chinese, being curious about the exact form of Yan’s style, but there is no Chinese publication available, either on the internet or as a physical copy. There is talk of a Taiwanese version, but it’s not distributed outside Taiwan. This is another case of a Chinese novel that can never be published in mainland China – and Yan has said that while he was writing the book, he knew he wouldn’t be able to publish it in his native country, so he wrote it with absolute freedom in his heart. Chinese writers generally work under self-censorship. This is a deep troublesome issue for any writer. From a practical point of view, it’s almost a necessity that writers bear in mind the regulations of censorship in composition. But what if the internal censor cannot do its job? The writer who recognises this can choose exile: Ma Jian in London, Gao Xingjian in Paris, Liao Yiwu in Berlin. But not every artist whose internal censor fails to suppress thought can, or wants to, take this option. And for them the only outcome is jail, with all civil rights removed by the state, as in the case of Liu Xiaobo, the poet and Nobel peace prize laureate. For Yan, the situation is complex. He is a well-respected state writer in China, but for most of his books, discussion in the official media is forbidden. Nor can he participate much in the official life of Chinese writers. Yet he is not interested in living abroad, even though he is the winner of the prestigious Franz Kafka prize and has been a finalist for the Man Booker International prize. He encompasses both internal and external contradictions, perhaps not an unusual Chinese predicament. A great writer is able to transfigure harsh reality, tread a path equally absurd and transcendent. In The Four Books, Yan confronts his characters with brutality, but also immerses them in religion and myth, and not just of the Chinese variety. The book of Genesis and the Virgin Mary obsess some of the characters: the Theologian eventually comes to hate the Virgin, whose icon he tramples, while the Child, who struggles to eradicate religious texts and images, perversely triggers his own spirituality. The novel ends with “A New Myth of Sisyphus”, presented as one of the four books on which the Scholar has been working intensely. Yan offers us a different Sisyphus and claims that a hero is “one who can accept the absurdity, hardship and punishment”. Yan seems to accept the idea of God, even though he is living in a post-Mao, atheistic China. As a reader, you close the book with a profound sense of how ideology has permeated and changed every sector of collective human life, from trivial daily matters to the great ruptures of history. • Xiaolu Guo’s I Am China is published by Chatto & Windus. To order The Four Books for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) visit bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min P&P of £1.99. __________________________________________________________________ More reviews Topics * Fiction in translation * Fiction * China __________________________________________________________________ * Share on Facebook * Share on Twitter * Share via Email * Share on Pinterest * Share on LinkedIn * Share on Google+ * Share on WhatsApp * Reuse this content View all comments > comments Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion. This discussion is closed for comments. We’re doing some maintenance right now. 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