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Down and out in Beijing by Tom Adair, the Scotsman, 19 January 08 THIS BOOK IS VACUUM-PACKED, refrigerated, a novel that keeps its cool. Prise open its covers and a light seems to glimmer, if dimly, from somewhere far off, the light of hope. The opening sentence sets the tone. "My youth began when I was 21 … that's when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life – some of them might possibly be for me." These words are curt. They are resolved to pin back your ears. The voice is Fenfang's. And you catch at once her steely, brittle determination, her icicle charm. Fenfang decides things for herself. She is her own woman – a modern woman in modern China. Born in a village far away, to slaving parents who barely communicate, Fenfang flees to the concrete vastness of Beijing, aged 17. Her belly is empty, her head is crammed full of crazy dreams. She wants to act in movies. Besotted with western films and novels, she dreams by night and works by day in menial jobs: an usherette, a cleaner and, finally, as an extra in second-rate films made by talentless directors. Her boyfriend, Xiao-lin, is a chauvinist boor who becomes abusive. She dumps him for Ben, a Bostonian student. Ben's sensitive male friends, Patton and Huizin, both would-be writers for the movies, attempt to befriend her, to fish her out of her deadbeat career. She drifts from one lodging place to another, dishevelled, disorganised and disgruntled. Ben leaves for America. Fenfang journeys home for New Year. Her parents welcome her with a feast and the usual silence. The go-nowhere village, in just three years, has become industrialised. Polluted. She sees again the reasons she left. There, in the midst of her struggling family, she experiences again a terrible loneliness. She flees. The narrative voice is impressively clear, unvarnished, honest. Xiaolu Guo invests Fenfang's story with subtle tensions – the casual sex, the leviathan concrete institutions that surround her in Beijing – provoking a sense of terrible meaninglessness and failure. Where are the shiny things she craves? Where is the starry career she longed for? Where is love? She has no female friends in whom to confide. No wonder anger gets her down as she harangues her token god – the "Heavenly Bastard in the Sky" – lamenting her lot. The novel's title captures the essence of Fenfang's existence – all broken bits. She spits out her life in a dolorous monologue. Her salvation is a sardonic sense of humour: "I turned my sleepy eyes towards the window. There wasn't the slightest indication the sky was blue or the sun was shining. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, why the hell would I want to get out of bed in a Beijing winter anyway?" Why indeed. All those ions of alienation imbue this novel with a strange sense of déjà vu, recalling the agonised French existentialism of the early 1950s, but with none its self-consciousness. Like the heroine of such fictions, and in frustration, Fenfang gives up acting and turns to writing scripts. Her first screen-treatment is laden with balefulness. She writes what she knows and feels. She is not commercial. In this respect she mirrors her creator, who made a splash with her debut novel Village of Stone in 2004. Fragments, belatedly published, turns out to be G As novels go it's a curate's egg. If you want a picture of China today as an embryonic industrial giant, or a crash course in Beijing slang (for instance "second breast" means mistress) then here is the ideal instructive novel for auto-didacts. On the down side, though, the novel is stretched too thinly. Its single voice, its monocular vision, its almost documentary style keep it cool and distant, implying an intimacy, yet permitting us no real insight into the life of its central voice or its voices-off. By the novel's conclusion a pin-point of light – a shiny reflection – may be discernible. Fenfang's good fortune, long overdue, takes a skyward lurch and the final pull-back shot – of sun and sky and summer – may read like a cliché but somehow, fitfully, it works.
Tom Adair published in the Scotsman, 19 January 08
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