The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan, Hamish Hamilton $255 THE Chinese Government condemned Mo Yan's most famous novel, Red Sorghum, for showing China in a backward light. That novel was set before the communists came to power, ending at the time of the Japanese occupation.
In Mo's newly-translated The Garlic Ballads, the brutalised way of life echoes that of Red Sorghum. But what is so damning, surprising and important is that the violent events it describes take place not in the distant past but in 1987. This, after all, is meant to be a time when China's peasants have never had it so good, thanks to the enlightened policies of Deng Xiaoping.
The Garlic Ballads has inevitably been banned in China. But this book is a warning that the communist powers should heed if they want to maintain the 'mandate of heaven'. For this is a brave, blistering critique of the condition of China's rural poor and the cultural values that shape and undermine the political system.
The book follows the arrest of several peasants, said to be instigators of 'the garlic incident'. The garlic growers have ransacked the government offices of Paradise County after the co-op refused to buy their crop - the government's instruction to grow garlic having resulted in a glut.
As the peasants are processed through China's judicial system, the book weaves together the tragic stories that leads these ordinary people to the gulag.
The most dramatic of the characters is Gao Ma, his life shattered by his love for Jinju. The men of her family have already arranged for her to marry an old man and blindly set about destroying them when the couple thwart their will.
