Review

In ancient China, a cruel, capricious and all powerful emperor ascends the throne after his father chokes on a chicken bone. He immediately orders a slaughter of all chickens, as well as close relatives who might threaten his power. The court scrambles to please the new emperor.

In contemporary Sydney, Xiang Lu is fired from his job as a translator with the Chinese consulate, when it’s discovered that he can’t speak Chinese and has been using Google Translate. Going viral as #BadChinese, he becomes mixed up in the world of experimental film director Baby Bao.

These two stories, of ancient Chinese court politics and contemporary media, alternate and eventually echo one another, satirising power, authoritarianism, politics, bureaucracy, film, social media and pretty much anything else they can ping along the way. Lu also shows a love and reverence for art, literature and language.

I loved it. It’s so funny, playful, clever, satirical, fabulous and absurd… all things I admire. It won this year’s Miles Franklin award and I can absolutely see why. Definitely the best Aus lit I’ve read in ages (not that I read a lot of it, to be fair). Siang Lu has been compared to Murakami and Calvino… again, I can definitely see why.

Here’s a taster quote, showing Lu’s playful satirical voice.

Dear citizens of the Imperial City,

It is with mixed emotions that we proclaim that Huan Zi Feng has vacated the post of Imperial Taster on account of: family reasons/exile/death.

Investigations have revealed the official cause of the death to be: a slow acting poison, doubtless bound for the throat of our resplendent Emperor.

We are hereby bound by law to note the dissent of the Shadow Historian, Sima Qing, whose pitifully worded records indicate that the Imperial Taster was, rather, bludgeoned to death by an angry mob, the body showing no apparent trace of poison. The Shadow Historian’s fictional and disruptive accounts have, for too long, brought our scholarship into disrepute. Moreover, it must be asked: can a person be trusted if he, like Sima Qing, has shown himself to be physically incapable of growing a beard — even the most rudimentary one? No. So states the offical record.

In any event, we are pleased to announce that the duties of the Imperial Taster are hereby passed to the deceased’s firstborn son, Huang Zi Yan, aged three months.

Huang Zi Yan brings 00 years of experience to this role.

*

And how about this? So lovely.

With each book he read, the grander his sketches became, until they no longer represented the Imperial City as it currently was, but instead an Imperial City of his own creation that he might one day build, each blueprint drawn in thick strokes of ink that, when viewed from another angle, seemed somehow like a poem, as though the city itself were made purely of words and language.

*

This reminds me of Winton’s Cloudstreet.

Ah Gong replaced each stick of incense with tokens collected from the village so that the clock might burn of jasmine or sunflower or cut grass – these divisions of the day to which he assigned a different aroma – and though the villagers did not have a name for that most difficult and languorous stretch of afternoon, they came somehow to think of it as the hour of chrysanthemum.

In weeks and months thereafter, moved by the metronomic wafting of oats, or chicken or steamed carp, the households that lived downwind of Ah Gong would prepare their meals in perfect parallel, for their stomachs had begun to growl in synchronicity, and in the night their dreams would be filled with the soothing scent of barley, of boiled milk, of oak, the lake and the stillness of the mountain soil.

The fabulism combined with satire is a delight. If you like your literature funny & quirky, get a copy of this. It’s wonderful. Best suited to year 10 & up.

Click here for content info — spoilers, enter at own risk.

Totalitarianism; despotism; many unfair executions, banishments, imprisonments and tortures (descriptions not too gory); implied rape; attempted rape (attempt is a complete failure); accidental deaths; a sprinkling of swears: f-words, s-words, etc.

*

Lu, S. (2024). Ghost cities. University of Queensland Press.

Images and quotations are used on this blog post under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968.

This novel was brought to me by Libby — support your local library!