CAN XUE - FRONTIER - (BOOK REVIEW)

Some time ago I decided to forgo my avoidance of contemporary fiction in order to dip into the world of Chinese literature. Normally I don’t read anything that isn’t at least fifty years old on the grounds that, despite the accolades of critics, it takes a few decades to determine if something is merely vapid ‘flavour of the month’ fodder or of actual merit. 

I did some quick research and came up with three representative Chinese novelists and promptly ordered a book from each of them.

The first of the trio I read was Ge Fei’s “Peach Blossom Paradise.” I’d struck gold. This gut-wrenching historical novel follows the fortunes of a young woman during the turbulent transition from empire to republic. I was deeply moved. In fact, this can lay claim to being among the best novels I’ve ever read (I’d even go so far as to place it equal top along with Vassily Grossman’s “Life and Fate”).

Next came Yu Hua’s “To Live.” Bingo! Another great read, this time centring on the tragic life of a man during the upheavals of the twentieth century. Similar to the previous novel, this was written in simple uncluttered prose but packed a huge emotional punch.

Then came Can Xue and her “Frontier.” I chose her because she is described as an experimental avant-garde writer, and being no stranger to “difficult” literature of this ilk (Joyce, Barth, Borges, Kafka, Cartarescu, Barthelme, Pynchon et al), she sounded like my kind of author.

A quick look through various high-brow publications’ reviews of ‘Frontier’ (first published in English in 2017) and one can see only glowing praise, focusing on the quality of her dreamlike magical prose. The reviews on Goodreads are mostly the same, with a few dissenters. (I only read these after I’d finished the book, by the way - I don’t like to pollute my reading experience with the views of others before I start, and eschew prefaces / introductions for the same reason).

And so I began the book. Something that immediately struck me was an odd decision proclaimed by the translators on a page just before the opening of the novel. For some inexplicable reason they decided that about half of the Chinese names of the characters were to be changed to Western ones which sounded somewhat like the originals. 

For example, two key characters, Hushan and Niansi, are called José and Nancy, and another, Shi Mao, is rendered as Sherman, whereas other prominent characters such as Liujin and Qiming, are not changed. What on earth is the point of this? From the examples given it obviously isn’t because some names might be more difficult to pronounce. Why not change all of them if you’re going to go down that route, just for the sake of consistency? (Although I think this would also have been a bad decision).

Imagine if a translation of The Brothers Karamazov featured Dmitri, John, Alexei and Fred as its protagonists. 

This decision on behalf of the translators is even stranger when one considers that in Chinese each of the names has a special meaning relevant to the character, something that would be immediately apparent to the Chinese reader but is lost to the English speaker, since the translators didn’t even bother to mention this anywhere.

But let’s get into the book itself. The story starts with Liujin, a woman who works in a shop selling cloth in a place called Pebble Town which is on, you guessed it, the frontier. From what we can gather from the rest of the novel, this is referring to the northern border of China and Mongolia. We learn of her strange interactions with neighbours and people from the market.

We get the same simple unadorned prose that I noted from the other two Chinese works, but with a surrealist twist. After thirty pages or so I was a bit bewildered, but gradually got used to this style of writing, although the penchant for sentences with unnecessary exclamation marks was a bit grating!

Characters continually appear and disappear, as do various strange animals, with recurring visitations from snow leopards, wolves and wagtails. Not everyone can see them. Odd sounds are heard by some and not by others. People lie on the ground listening to things, or stand in rivers. Nobody seems to actually work. 

The characters are only differentiated by their names and physical descriptions but their words are all the same - short sentences, lots of non-sequiturs and rhetorical questions. Completely interchangeable.

All very strange, but I was intrigued and eager to read on. 

Chapter Two takes the reader back in time to when Liujin’s parents, Hushan and Niansi (I refuse to call them by those ludicrous Western substitute names) leave their daughter and go to live at the mysterious Design Institute, a place that exists on the fringes of Pebble Town beneath the never really visible Snow Mountain. Here I was really enthralled and couldn’t wait to unravel its secrets.

Who is the evasive gardener who takes care of the paradise-like floating garden that almost nobody ever sees? Who is the Director and what relation is she to the other characters? What exactly do they do at the Design Institute?

(None of these questions ever get answered). 

From such a promising start, the novel then descends into tedious repetition for the following two hundred pages or so, with the same scenarios being played out again and again and again. Perhaps some reviewers enjoyed this and felt it to be pleasantly mesmeric, but for me it was utterly boring. 

In chapters devoted to pairs of characters, birds and animals appear and disappear, people have nearly identical nonsensical conversations, things are never what they seem, and the lack of emotional depth becomes all too apparent. I couldn’t identify with anything or anyone in this book, and didn’t care for any of the protagonists. And I love wagtails!

I suspect that apart from some vague ideas of humans and their relation to nature, perceptions of dreams and reality, loneliness, and just maybe a hint of politics (Uighurs are mentioned, as are speakers of other language varieties in this Chinese backwater), this a shallow novel. We are firmly in Emperor’s New Clothes territory. The author says that she doesn’t edit after writing, and it shows. In a work like Finnegans Wake, for example, even if you aren’t getting much from its apparent weirdness, you know that Joyce spent seventeen years writing it and agonized over individual sentences and words, packing them with meanings, no matter how obscure and layered. I do not think that anywhere near the same attention was paid to ‘Frontier.’

Many critics have praised Xue’s beautiful writing. Let’s look at a brief but representative sample:

When he inquired about retirement, the person in charge told him, “You can work here until you die!”

But he no longer wanted to work here. He wanted to change himself into a fish.

The manager was a little disappointed. “Go ahead and retire. If you want to come back later, you may.”

I would not call this beautiful writing. Pay attention to the sentence in bold. This desire for piscine metamorphosis comes out of nowhere and is never mentioned again. It’s a throw-away line to keep up the feeling of weirdness, but it comes across as childish and meaningless. Of course, one critic preempted such objections by going down the ‘if you say it looks like it was written by a child then you’ve missed the point, you’re making the same kind of accusations as were made against Picasso, so who’s the idiot now?’ route.

In all fairness, the book did pick up again in the last fifty pages or so, which is why I think that with some very necessary pruning it could have been a decent one hundred and fifty page novella, instead of it weighing in at three hundred and sixty. As it stands, it’s a mediocre effort.

Will Frontier be on the curriculum or appearing in those lists of must-read books a hundred years from now? I doubt it.

In the end I rated it a generous 6/10.