Books review: The Day the Sun Died, by Yan Lianke

I ask him this question because a famous Chinese novelist called Yan Lianke features in many of his unique novels. And so it is with his latest, the surreal, satirical The Day the Sun Died, in which Yan Lianke is described as a famous author who finds himself unable to write. Indeed, the prize-winning author himself tells me: “With my last few novels I’ve always worried whether this might be my last. Will I not be able to write as well again after this? There are so many fantastic stories in China but will I be able to carry on doing well or even better?”

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> The Day the Sun Died has a 14-year-old protagonist/narrator, Li Niannian, who has tried to read Yan’s novels but does not rate them -- and tells him so. The real Yan plays with his own body of work so fictitious texts of his books are quoted and criticised throughout, permutations of the “real” novels -- his novel Lenin’s Kisses turns into Kissing Lenin, a book the boy reads and critiques incorrectly in the opening chapter.

Why?

“This boy is not particularly bright so the texts are muddled. He is not well read -- it’s a device to make it more convenient for me to tell a story,” replies Yan speaking through an interpreter. “Look at all the other Yan Liankes in my other stories -- they’re all very different. It is to do with changing pace. The real Yan Lianke, the famous novelist, is not the same all over the world. Back home, the people say, ‘Well, you are really famous and that’s good but maybe you are not a really good person.’”

A mild-mannered man but an outstanding writer with a dark vision, Yan was born in a poor, isolated town in Henan, in central China, where starving people ate elm tree bark and white clay to survive. He is one of the most famous and prolific of today’s Chinese novelists, although much of his work is banned. The author of a raft of novels and short story collections, he wins international prizes -- most fittingly the Franz Kafka in 2014 -- and was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.

The Day the Sun Died recently won the Dream of the Red Chamber Award for the World’s most distinguished novel in Chinese. Like so many of his other fictions, it has not been published in mainland China. Four of his books -- including one titled Four Books -- have been banned while the rest of his work has been a frequent target of government censorship. But then he explains cheerfully: “I am a controversial writer.”

Yet, he was able to travel from his home in Beijing, where he lives with his wife and son, to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, unlike other global writers who were denied visas this year? “I am actually pretty happy as I have my passport. I can come and go as I please. I am writing so it really doesn’t matter to me whether I get published or not in China. If I can finish a work, that is good. I really don’t want politics to pay too much attention to me. It used to make me sad that my work was treated with suspicion. I was stressed and anxious. Now I have no such worries. The most chilling thing is the way Well, I tell him, long may he carry on doing so since The Day the Sun Died is unlike any other fiction I have ever read. Yan beams and says: “I am very surprised that western readers like this book. Since it has not been published in China, it’s been a real concern as to whether western readers would like it so you have made me very happy.” Happiness, however, is not part of Yan’s literary currency. In The Day the Sun Died, the story takes place in a village over a 24-hour period in June in which villagers are affected by mass somnambulism or as the Chinese phrase has it, “dreamwalking.” Events are related hour-by-hour by Li Niannian, whose parents earn a pittance making and selling funerary paraphernalia. His uncle, an official in a crematorium, is also in the death business -- he bans burials and mandates cremation, which makes him wealthy and much despised.

The fictional Yan Lianke, suffering from writer’s block, also succumbs to a bout of dreamwalking before returning to his senses and promising to write the story of the nightmarish events and heavy death toll.

Dark absurdism? “No,” insists Yan, who is an ex-military man. “I invented the term ‘mythorealism’ to describe my work. What I am talking about is inner realities, the realities of the spirits, the invisible, covered-up ones. Mythorealism may not have a strong logic in the real world -- magical realism, for instance, has a logic in reality -- but its logic is in the head and the spirit. Take this novel, where people are trying to create a sun. You would not do that in real life, although...” -- he smiles and gestures at Edinburgh’s dreich grey skies -- “but it feels real in the book.”

To talk in terms of dark absurdism is not quite right, he claims. “A Harvard Professor said this is the darkest book he has ever read. I corrected him, I said, ‘No, it is the very deepest. It goes to deep, profound places. I take the darkest places and the darkest shadows and find points of light within them. It is about depth.

“There are a great many stories in China, which is changing in ways that are hard to imagine so the stories are changing too. They are becoming more complicated and there is no one alive who can judge the way China is now. The country is like a boat floating on the sea and you have no idea where it is going to float to next. This is what makes Chinese people feel most insecure. Just like in the story, all the dreamers are very clear what they want to do but when they wake, they do not know.

“As to the Chinese Dream -- in China people look to the American Dream and imagine it is something wonderful. Perhaps Americans feel differently?” I tell him that President Trump has claimed that the American Dream is dead. “Has he? I did not know that. Chinese people have real concerns in their hearts as to what this Chinese Dream is -- it is concerning for the rest of the world as well. It is impossible to define the Chinese Dream. Even the people who invented the phrase do not know, although without question the economic development has been superb. Yet in some ways China is moving backwards. This prosperity has brought many things that are dark, particularly to our emotional and spiritual life. Darkness is the Chinese people’s fate.

“In the same way that the ultimate triumph of Communism is a dream, you can’t say for sure what form this Chinese Dream is going to take. In the end, the personal dream is more important than the national dream.”

The issue about burial and cremation that he explores in the novel is not metaphorical. He produces his phone and Googles what he calls “a burning issue” -- in every sense. “A month ago in Jiangxi province the order came down that every dead person was to be cremated. The coffins that old people had kept by them for luck and for their own burials were smashed. This is a very painful issue, very real.”

Is it true that his mother and siblings do not understand why he is so critical of the government?

“My mother is illiterate. She has complete belief in propaganda and total belief in our leaders,” he sighs. “I do not discuss these things with them because they are extremely uncritical. They believe everything unquestioningly. I invariably question every single thing. When we talk, it is about their daily lives and needs, how they live and how I can make things better for them.”

What is his dream?

“I have a dream that one day I will be able to write a wonderful book that everyone in the world will understand because it is the most wonderful book ever. It’s only a dream! I am writing my next novel, about religion in China, but no matter how dark my novels are the power of love and optimism and goodness is always there.”

The Day the Sun Died, by Yan Lianke is translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas (Chatto & Windus, £14.99).