"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien

Shortlisted for the 2017 Women's Prize for fiction. 

I found this a curiously muddled novel. The frame story, which I found distracting and, to some extent, redundant, involves Marie Jiang, a Canadian of Chinese descent trying to discover what has happened to her missing dad with the help of Ai-ming, an illegal immigrant from China who is staying with her family. The main narrative concerns the history of how Marie's father, Jiang Kai, once a renowned concert pianist was involved with Sparrow, a composer, the father of the immigrant, and Sparrow's extended family: his uncle Wen the Dreamer and Wen's daughter, violin student Zhuli, Sparrow's mother, Big Mother, and father, long marcher Ba Lute, and others. This is mostly their history, focusing on how the events of the cultural revolution affected Jiang Kai, Sparrow and Zhuli, and how the student protests in Tienanmen Square affected Sparrow and Ai-ming.

The PoV head hops between the principal characters; we are able to hear the thoughts of Saprro and Zhuli, of Marie and Ai-ming and Wen the dreamer, and to a certain extent of the other characters. Given the complex nature of the story, and the revolving cast, such that there is no single character who can narrate the entire story, this way of telling the story is probably inevitable. 

Perhaps it is a sort of Doctor Zhivago for China. It reminded me also of Wild Swans by Jung Chang.

There's also another story, that of the apocryphal and fragmentary Book of Records, incomplete and copied by hand and curated mostly by Wen the Dreamer, who uses the repeated copies to encode hints as to what happened to him and others during the purges of the cultural revolution. This Book, and Sparrow's music, symbolise both the fragility and endurance of art.

There's also a theme about systems of coding (primarily linguistic and musical, but also mathematical) and their ambiguities (Chinese characters can, it seems,  be interpreted in a number of ways). It's about recording histories in the face of the destruction of records and the distortions of truth implemented by governments.

It is a complicated novel and quite long-winded; I had to break it into small chunks and read it over an extended period of time to manage it. The principal characters (Swallow, Zhuli, and Jiang Kai) are complex and real; others such as Big Mother and Ba Lute are Dickensian in that they are larger than life but quite one-dimensional. It paints a compelling picture of a very alien society and its upheaval. But it's hard work and a more straightforward narrative with a simpler structure and a smaller cast would have been more entertaining. Nevertheless, I suspect that poor Swallow and conflicted Jiang Kai will stay with me long after characters from lesser novels are forgotten.

Selected quotes:

• "Quiet became another person living inside our house. It slept in the closet with my father's shirts, trousers and shoes, it guarded his Beethoven, Prokofiev and Shostakovich scores, his hats, armchair and special cup. Quiet moved into our minds and stormed like an ocean inside my mother and me." (1.1)
• "The peaceful Sparrow was weightless because he had no baggage to carry and no messages to deliver." (1.1)
• "The melting ice made a sound like all the bones in China cracking." (1.1)
• "Their great fear was not death, but the brevity of an insufficient life." (1.2)
• "In general, anything universally praised is usually preposterous rubbish." (1.2)
• "The candlelight grazed all the objects of the room." (1.3)
• "Look at you quivering like a bag of fresh tofu!" (1.5)
• "The glazed expression of someone who had withstood hours of adoration." (1.5)
• "The beauty queen would never be a great violinist ... She hid the moon and shamed the flowers, as the poets said, but she played Beethoven as if he had never been alive." (1.5)
• "When I remember my past, I see myself as if from the outside, I perceive myself as another person might." (1.6)
• "In English, consciousness and unconsciousness are part of a vertical plane, so that we wake up and we fall asleep and we sink into a coma. Chinese uses the horizontal line, so that to wake up is to cross a border towards consciousness and to faint is to go back. Meanwhile, time itself is vertical so that last year is 'the year above' and next year is 'the year below'. The day before yesterday is the day 'in front' and the day after tomorrow is the day 'behind'. This means that future generations are not the generations ahead, but the ones behind. Therefore. to look into the future one must turn around." (1.7)
• "Pride and mastery, victory and sorrow, the orchestral language had given Sparrow a deep repertoire of feeling. But scorn, degradation, disgust, loathing, what about these emotions? What composer had written a language for them?" (1.8)
• "What was fortune? She had come to believe it was being exactly the same on the inside as on the outside. What was misfortune but the quality of existing as something, or someone else, inside?" (2.5)
• "Her father had been categorized as a criminal element, but with a diary this dull, there was no way he could be a hooligan." (2.5)
• "It was very modern and deeply Western to listen to music that no one else could hear. Private music led to private thoughts. Private thoughts led to private desires. to private fulfillments or private hungers, to a whole private universe away from parents, family and society." (2.5)

This novel was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2016; other short-listed novels in this and other years can be found here. 

August 2022; 463 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God