Lenin's Kisses by Yan Lianke – review

The award-winning novelist Yan Lianke (pictured) is one of China's most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire. His work is animated by an affectionate loyalty to his peasant origins in the poverty-stricken province of Henan, and fierce anger over the political abuses of the regime.

Yan, 53, has won China's top literary prizes; he has also had an increasingly fraught relationship with the censors. His first novel, Xia Ri Luo (The Sun Goes Down), published in 1994 while he was an army propaganda writer, was banned. One of his most popular novels, Serve the People, a sexually charged comedy that lampooned the cult of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution, was also banned. He later said that to try to avoid another ban he had toned down the next novel, Dream of Ding Village, a devastating fictionalisation of the Aids epidemic that ravaged Henan as a result of a government-run blood-selling scheme in the 1990s. Even the toned-down version failed to appease the censor; although, in a paradox characteristic of Yan's position, the novel was made into a film that was released in China.

Lenin's Kisses, ably translated by Carlos Rojas, preceded Dream of Ding Village and was the last of Yan's novels to date to be readily available to Chinese readers. First published in China 10 years ago under the title Enjoyment, it won the Lao She literary award, named after one of China's most distinguished 20th-century writers. The army, though, lost patience with their wayward propagandist and Lianke was asked to leave his job.

Lenin's Kisses is an absurdist historical allegory of the money-making fever that swept China after Deng Xiaoping opened up the Chinese economy in the 1990s. It is set in Liven, a mountain village founded by disabled dropouts from a forced relocation in the Qing Dynasty, so remote that it has escaped official attention. The back story of the village and its characters is told through the device of footnotes and further reading, labelled, like the chapters, only in odd numbers as a nod to China's continuing literary and historical censorship.

Liven's 197 inhabitants have a variety of disabilities, but they live a peaceful and abundant life without distinctions of class. This changes when Mao Zhi, a woman who had served in the revolutionary army before fleeing to Liven after a military defeat, discovers, belatedly, that the revolution has triumphed and persuades the villagers that they must join the new socialist society.

There follow a series of disasters based on real events: their pots and pans, tools and farm implements are seized in the "Great Iron Tragedy", a satirical retelling of Mao's backyard steel-making in the late 50s; they starve in the year of "Great Plunder" after officials take all their grain, as tens of millions did in Mao's Great Leap Forward; they are persecuted in the time of "Red and Black Crimes", a retelling of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Mao Zhi, now the village matriarch, is so appalled by the results of her actions that she resolves to remove Liven from government attention. Before she can succeed, another absurdity sweeps the village: after a strange summer snowstorm ruins the harvest, Liu Yingque, a greedy local official with imperial ambitions, decides that the solution to the persistent poverty of his fiefdom is to buy Lenin's embalmed corpse from Russia and install it as a tourist attraction. The corpse would attract thousands of visitors, he tells the villagers; the streets would be paved with jade. The only obstacle is the huge sum of money required to buy it and build its grandiose mausoleum. At Liven's annual festival, inspiration strikes: Liu forms a touring theatrical company made up of Liven's disabled residents, each of whom has developed extraordinary compensatory powers: a blind girl can hear a feather drop; a one-legged boy can leap extraordinary distances; a paraplegic woman can embroider with astonishing speed and skill; a polio victim squeezes his deformed foot into a glass bottle. The troupe is a smash hit across the country.

In this dark comedy, government officials are vainglorious and corrupt and able-bodied citizens brutal and dishonest; the mausoleum, which exactly matches the dimensions of Mao Zedong's mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, is absurdly overblown. The theme of suppressed historical truth is unmissable.

Last year, in a despairing column for the New York Times about personal and political life in China, Yan wrote of an unpublished novel about the Great Leap Forward famine, a novel that he had worked on for 20 years and that had been banned. He has advised writers to confront censorship with "art, not politics". This baggy but innovative novel, with its wit, humanity and satire, sets a provocative example.