The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke review – the stuff of nightmares

Yan Lianke’s novels tend to be experimental and nod to the absurd, with a fondness for meta-narrative flourishes: he features as a character in a number of his own novels, including this one. One of his earlier novels Serve the People! was an erotic satire, but his work has grown darker over the years. He insists that he writes about life rather than politics, but his work is deeply entwined with China’s tortuous politics – its absurdity, hypocrisy, corruption and the suffering it causes.

In The Four Books, he tackled the mass starvation induced by the Great Leap Forward; in Dream of Ding Village, he retold the story of the blood-selling scandal in his native Henan Province, which saw thousands of impoverished farmers infected with Aids. The Day the Sun Died takes on Xi Jinping’s “Chinese dream” – a promise to restore China to a position of global importance, hopefully in time for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese communist party in 2021.

The novel is set in a village over a 24-hour period in June in which the villagers are afflicted by mass somnambulism, or as the Chinese put it “dream walking”. The events are recounted hour by hour through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy, Li Niannian, whose parents eke out a living making and selling funerary paraphernalia.

Our hero’s maternal uncle is also in the death business, as the official in charge of the crematorium: his zealous enforcement of regulations that ban burials and mandate cremation make him both rich and universally hated. It is also widely suspected that Niannian’s father is an informer, earning money from tipping the crematorium off about village families secretly burying their dead. Later, he buys and stores barrels of human oil that the crematorium collects from the corpses. Quite why is unclear, although those same barrels re-enter the plot at the redemptive finale.

Yan Lianke’s own character is described as a famous author who finds himself unable to write. Young Niannian has tried to read Yan’s novels but does not think much of them and tells him so. Yan also suffers a bout of dream walking before returning to his senses in the final crisis and promising to write the story of the night’s extraordinary events.

Xi’s Jinping’s Chinese dream is a vision of national renewal. The Day the Sun Died is the stuff of nightmares with a heavy death toll. Villagers die harvesting at night; some fall into ditches; others meet with accidents. As the hours pass, their behaviour descends into a moral abyss as they realise that the sleepwalking affords unequalled opportunities for theft. The local officials sink into licentiousness and outsiders flock in to pillage. Our hero survives, although not unscathed.

A false prophet arises and a full-blown insurrection seems likely. Amid the chaos, Niannian’s father wanders the streets, trying to wake his neighbours, and seeking atonement for his own past sins. As the long night nears its end, the sun fails to return. The official news blames freak weather conditions: there is clearly no help from the authorities and it comes down to one individual to save the day.

Yan’s disgust for his country’s moral degradation is unmistakable: a predatory ruling party exploiting its people even in death; the people themselves adrift from ritual and social norms and who now think only of getting rich at all costs. In his earlier works, Yan’s bleak view was enlivened with satire. Here, such moments are scarce: his characters follow their increasingly bizarre scripts without engaging the reader, despite Carlos Rojas’s impeccable translation. It is as though the burden of being a writer in today’s China has become too heavy, the accumulation of unthinkable events too great, even for such a master as Yan Lianke.

Isabel Hilton is a journalist who specialises in China.