Where will China go from here?

According to Zhang Yimou, director of House of Flying Daggers and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, ‘orderly movements create beauty’. The West, he says, can’t do order. ‘They have all sorts of organizations, trade unions.’ It took a lot of control to make the Games appear as polished as they did. China’s successes are tied to its suppressions.

This, says Philip Pan in Out of Mao’s Shadow, is reason to be sceptical about predictions of economic openness presaging social and political freedoms in China. Take the case of Chen Lihua. Chen, who is known as ‘The Rich Lady’ – China’s richest, in fact – is worth approximately $500 million. She made her money first from antique furniture, picked up at bargain prices from government warehouses used to store what the Red Guards stole, and then from property deals. The largest of these involved demolishing the homes of 2,100 families in the old hutong districts of central Beijing. The rights to the houses were secured, cheaply, from the government. The demolition was achieved in just twenty-eight days. Pan asked Wang Shouyuan, a former Beijing politico who became one of Chen’s aides, to explain the ease with which her company had cleared the fifty-five acres of land necessary to undertake the project. ‘For demolition to proceed quickly,’ Wang said, ‘it relies on a combination of strength and force…Strength means giving enough money. Force means the backing of the government’. Chen’s route to riches, and China’s route to economic growth so far, has been ‘authoritarian capitalism’, the oligarchic grab.

Pan’s book paints a pointillist picture of the country, collecting individual stories gathered during his seven years as the Washington Post’s correspondent in Beijing. He gradually builds an image of a rigid, creaking complex of big business, political control and nationalist myth-making that is occasionally, movingly, but all too rarely cracked by the individual struggles of lawyers, doctors, academics, bloggers, film-makers and aspirant unionists and democrats.

To a book with a similarly penumbral title – Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark. Auster’s last novel, Travels in the Scriptorium, began with a man, Mr. Blank, alone in a room trying to remember how he got there. In Man in the Dark, Auster’s narrator, August Brill, lies awake in Vermont through ‘another white night in the great American wilderness’ trying not to remember a host of recent traumas. To that end he tells himself the story of Owen Brick, who finds himself in a parallel America, at war with itself following the 2000 presidential election. Brick’s America is one in which the Twin Towers still stand and Iraq was never invaded. Dragged from his hole by Sergeant Serge Tobak, Brick is sent on a mission to kill the war’s author and instigator – the retired and widowed writer August Brill, who is inventing the war in a room in Vermont.

Auster’s fame is founded on literary trickery, and this book is no exception. The story of Owen Brick – a thriller interspersed with anguished returns to Brill, alone in his room – is excitingly and vividly written but it ends rather too abruptly; a symptom, it seems, of two narratives that are never successfully run together.

The third part of Javier Marías’s novel in three parts, Your Face Tomorrow, is scheduled for publication in 2010. Weighing in at over 700 pages in Spanish Poison, Shadow and Farewell is currently being translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa and I am lucky to have been sent a manuscript of the first half of the translation. The novel continues the story of Jacques Deza, a Spaniard in London, and his work for the intelligence organization run by Bertram Tupra. The first two novels, Fever and Spear and Dance and Dream, were written in a fiercely analytical and winding prose. They are thrillers as much as they are philosophical investigations into selfhood and memory and Dance and Dream in particular contained some of the funniest writing I’ve read. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of Poison, Shadow and Farewell when it is published.