Something Like a House
Picador £12.99, pp216
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Westerners who write fiction about China have to tread carefully. The man-traps of post-colonial theory lie about, ready to snap shut should the author patronise, misunderstand, or otherwise 'orientalise' the subject matter. Chinese critics are also sensitive to the way their country is represented - the American Nobel Laureate Pearl Buck was accused in the 1930s of 'selling the heads of savages to Westerners' for her novels about the Chinese peasantry. And China does seem to bring out the worst in writers: I haven't read a good novel about China by a Westerner since André Malraux's masterpiece, Man's Estate, written in 1928.
Apart, that is, from Sid Smith's wonderful first book Something Like a House, which rightly arrives in the shops trailing clouds of pre-publication glory. Smith's audacity, and his originality, is to set his novel in rural China during the Maoist years, a period when few foreigners, save Communist sympathisers were allowed behind the 'Bamboo Curtain'.
Jim Fraser, a British soldier on UN manoeuvres during the Korean War, deserts and surrenders himself to the advancing Chinese army. He ends up billeted in a remote village populated by the Miao people (one of China's national minorities), under the supervision of Old Tao, an indigent village elder. The locals gradually come to accept the 'round-eye' and, save for the occasional visit from party apparatchiks and the sinister goings-on in a clinic, there is little to perturb Jim.
He settles into the rhythms of the countryside: working the land, tending the water buffalo and building himself something like a house. (The book's title makes more sense if you know the short lyric by Emily Dickinson which begins: 'Remembrance has a rear and front,/ 'Tis something like a house.') Ten years after his arrival in the village, China is plunged into the violent bedlam of the Cultural Revolution.
The novel is almost perfectly constructed, though to explain its structural appeal I would have to spill its secrets. It is also marvellous for its brevity, managing to span 35 years in little more than 200 pages without any sense of hurry or agitation. Smith writes with a chastity of style that is uncommon in contemporary fiction. He has a compressive imagination, able to abbreviate a landscape to a brace of images, or an image to a single word. An old cap left on a hook has grown within itself a 'green wig' of mould; a Chinese woman totters by on bound feet 'the size of fists'. Fraser watches as lice on a cat 'swim like dolphins through the fur of its head, seeking the right side'.
At no point is China's history, culture or landscape brandished for its own exotic sake. Shocking details do emerge - when a brigade of Red Guards take Fraser with them on their rampages, he forces pork down the throats of Muslims, wears a Mao badge pinned through the flesh over his heart, watches and inflicts tortures, and is witness to cannibalism - but they are made more forceful by the unsensational manner of their telling.
I suspect this book will be compared with Robinson Crusoe (the outsider building his own abode) and Lord of the Flies (the long-term effects of context on individual morality). It is a profound and sophisticated work of fiction.