Ghost Cities

By

 


As a reader, this is my kind of novel. Multilayered, comical, clever in plot and wordplay. It has also achieved great success – winning the prestigious Miles Franklin Award and shortlisted for almost every other Australian literary awards. But famously it took ten years to publish, as Siang Lu exhausted every literary agents in Australia and the U.S. before University of Queensland Press finally published it as Lu’s second novel. I’d like to think that there are lessons to learn for all those agents and publisher who turned down the manuscript. And for writers, to appreciate that perseverance and undaunted self-belief is a job requirement for anyone with an original, quality manuscript in their hands.

The novel opens in Imperial China with the coronation of Emperor Lu Huang Du. The Emperor has great power, exercised in both ruthless and ludicrous ways: ‘His first act as Emperor was to order the execution of all who repeated the rumours [of patricide and regicide]. His second act was to order the deaths of the chickens – all of them’ (p. 3). A series of advisers are thrown into the ‘Six Levels of Hell’ (Imperial Prison) and we are introduced to absurd proclamations to the ‘Dear citizens of the Imperial City’ (p. 5). A macabre testing of taste-testers follows, with only one survivor from the ‘Poisoned Banquet’ – a beggar who gains the royal title, ‘Taster to the Taster’.

That’s just the opening chapter, and it’s only 5 pages in length.

Chapter 2 shifts the narrative to an Australian character in George Street Sydney, in contemporary times. Xiang Lu is reluctantly visiting Doctor Mok (‘Is there another doctor available? I saw Doctor Collision last time’ [p. 9]) Xiang admits that his ancestors are Chinese, and he is diagnosed with a condition called ‘Taikophobia’: fear of Chinese people (p. 11). It’s not a good day for Xiang, who is dismissed from his job as a translator for the Chinese Consulate after they realise that his Chinese language is poor and he has been using Google Translate. He is ‘a bad Chinese person’, and the hashtag ‘Bad Chinese’ is born.

That’s chapter 2, also 5 pages in length.

Obviously, I am not going to continue to describe each chapter but the summaries indicate the narrative structure with its dual setting, shift between the past and present-- side-by-side narratives unified by a comic tone and a sense of the absurd. Xiang is a likeable character, open-hearted, soon falling in love with a real translator named Yuan; he is out of his depth with her intelligence and beauty, but redeemed through humour, like a character from a romantic comedy.  

About a hundred pages into the novel, the second narrative (Xiang’s) takes us away from the Sydney setting to one of China’s ghost cities, Port Man Tou. A powerful Chinese film director Baby Bao has opened part of the city to act as a film set, with thousands of people employed as actors to live out seemingly normal lives under the gaze of ever-present cameras. And #BadChinese is to be part of the promotional material and publicity machinery. In the meantime, the ‘historical’ narrative takes the reader into an equally Borgesian world of labyrinths and shadow historians. One of the many quirky tales involves the Emperor creating dozens of doubles, only to be enraged when a ‘golden-robed doppelganger’ takes over the Imperial Palace, as the Trickster strides the grounds ‘with impunity’ (p.202).

The back cover compares the allegorical and imaginative novel to Haruki Murakami and Italo Calvino, and this seems like a good field. But I like the Australian-Chinese nature of the novel in its dual settings, its comedy and outlook. Xiang proves his worth to Yuan by refusing his role in a Chinese dating show, ‘live in China and [broadcast] on delay in Australia’ (p. 274). The outcome described in the vernacular: ‘Shit. This is not going at all like I imagined’ (p. 276).

Xiang has become a celebrity but escapes his #BadChinese brand by (ironically) learning some Chinese. As for the city, it too evolves in a manner that might be read as emblematic of culture beyond the Anglo-European western metropole (whether that be in China or Australia):

We watch as the city reconstructs itself from its own materials … On certain days it comes to resemble other cities, all cities … the 7th arrondissement in Pari. Times Square in New York. The skyline of Nihonbashi Kabutochõ.

Of late, its imposing structures have come to resemble nothing we know. Restlessly, it replaces itself with new and stranger iterations. The city has no referents now. Only itself. (p. 290).

That sounds like a post-colonial dream of authenticity. Imagine that Sydney, Melbourne or Perth – and not just the ghost city of Port Man Tou – woke up to itself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wood Green

By
Image
Novels and films that explore the relationship between a young, would-be writer, and a more experienced writer-mentor are not necessarily new but Sean Rabin’s Wood Green has done something a little different with this ‘genre’. The idea seems to appeal: think of the success of Joël Dicker’s The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair – a murder mystery of sorts, with a younger writer living with and assisting his mentor. Then there is the very engaging thriller – John Colapinto’s About the Author, which is not so much about the mentor but the idea of literary theft as a shortcut to success. Sean Rabin plays around with some of these ideas, as young Michael arrives in Hobart to assist Lucian Clarke put together his papers (for posterity, or for some biographical project, yet to be determined). At several points, Michael, who has completed a PhD on Clarke, considers how he might either make use of Lucian’s papers for his own purposes, or else appropriate Lucian’s incomplete manuscript as...
Read more

The Plains

By
Image
  The Plains was once described by Ben Lerner as a ‘strange Australian masterpiece’, a novel that ‘can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’ ( The New Yorker, 29 March 2017).While Gerald Murnane locates the story in the Australian continent, its mythic qualities are such that Lerner recognises the expansive grasslands and unobstructed sky of the Great Plains of North America.   Wayne MacCauley also makes the case for a wider reading in his introduction to the 2012 Text Publishing edition to Murnane’s 1982 novel, placing it figuratively in ‘the library of alternative Australian fiction’ (vii), a reading experience he compares to ‘anything proposed by Swift, Kafka, Borges or Calvino’ (ix). Indeed, these are appropriate references. From Swift and Calvino, the sense of allegory and fable; from Kafka, the alternative world, dream-like but here more faintly oppressive; from Borges, the labyrinth library of poets, artists and writers endlessly specia...
Read more

The Music of Chance

By
Image
  Paul Auster writes about chance in most of his novels, from a chance phone call in ‘City of Glass’ ( New York Trilogy ) to writing four versions of the same life, with outcomes dictated by an incident or its absence in 4321 . The Music of Chance has such elements: Nashe begins a year of driving across America on a whim, after missing a ramp on the freeway, Nashe heads in the opposite direction to where he had planned to go. Committed now to the wrong road, he understood ‘that there was no difference, that both ramps were finally the same’ (p. 5). Similarly, when Nashe picks up a beaten-up young hitchhiker, Jack Pozzi, his life changes, ‘for better or worse’ in that moment (p. 19). For the record, decidedly for the worse. The strange, the surreal, also characterise many Auster novels. In Mr Vertigo , Walt undergoes bizare and difficult trainings (such as being buried alive) before learning to levitate, earning a living a circus by making the impossible appear to be simply a tri...
Read more