The Four Books review – Yan Lianke holds China to account for Maoist atrocities

The remarkable Chinese novelist Yan Lianke has explained what he calls “amnesia with Chinese characteristics” as a state-administered loss of memory that the regime sees as essential to its survival. This amnesia, he has written, is achieved by shackling people’s minds, altering historical records, manipulating textbooks, controlling literature and the arts, and using financial incentives to entice people to give up their memories.

Yan Lianke himself must count as one of this strategy’s greatest failures. No other writer in today’s China has so consistently explored, dissected and mocked the past six and a half decades of Chinese communist rule. He has never been shy of treading on the Party’s toes: he has satirised the Cultural Revolution, (Serve the People!); explored the horrors of an official blood-selling scheme in his native Henan province and the Aids epidemic it caused (Dream of Ding Village), and mocked China’s move to capitalism (Lenin’s Kisses). The fortunes of these novels at the hands of the censors were mixed: some were published in China, others were published only to be withdrawn.

His most recent novel, The Four Books, now translated impeccably into English by Carlos Rojas, has proved a step too far. Banned in mainland China, it is squarely planted in a blank passage of official history, the years between 1958 and 1962, and the catastrophic events that the party created and which it continues to try to scrub from the nation’s memory. This was the time of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s crash industrialisation scheme. Agriculture collapsed, the countryside was devastated, and up to 40 million people were starved to death. As the people starved, China was exporting the rice they had produced.

Yan has written that The Four Books took him 20 years to plan and two to write. He wrote it exactly as he wanted to, without regard for the censor. It was rejected by 20 publishers, all of whom understood that publishing it would mean they would be shut down.

The action is set in a re-education camp in the north of China, close to the Yellow river. Intellectuals named only after their professions – the Theologian, the Scholar, the Linguist, the Engineer, the Musician, the Author – have been labelled “rightists”, and are being politically “re-educated” through labour, under the control of the camp commander, a strangely juvenile figure known as the Child. The Child keeps warm through the winter by burning the books the prisoners have attempted to conceal. He runs the camp according to his own Ten Commandments, the last of which is Thou shall not flee, and controls prisoner behaviour through rewards of red paper blossoms and stars. Those who collect enough are promised release; the Child himself eagerly collects them in the hope of promotion.

The title nods both to the gospels and to the Four Books of the classical Confucian canon. The novel comprises fragments of Yan Lianke’s own fictitious four books, two of which are written by the Author – Criminal Records, secret reports on his fellow inmates, produced for the Child on the promise of release; and excerpts from The Old Course, the Author’s 500-page novel. There are also fragments of Heaven’s Child, an anonymous manuscript written in biblical style; and the New Myth of Sisyphus, a philosophical reflection on divine punishment and human response. Woven together, these “texts” reflect the catastrophe of the times and meditate on the meaning of integrity, truth, love and ethics when confronted with horror. Yan Lianke has said that he hopes a memorial to amnesia engraved with all China’s nation’s painful memories of the past century could one day be erected on Tiananmen Square. That day remains distant, but while he waits, he has produced an extraordinary novel, one that both commemorates the state’s victims and defies China’s state-sponsored amnesia.

The Four Books is published by Chatto & Windus. Click here to buy it for £11.99