One man's personal and philosophical odyssey evolves against the dramatic and vibrantly physical background of Central China's ancient forests. This is an adventurous narrative that is less about story and more about the randomness and inevitability of existence. Last year's Nobel Literature Laureate, China's Gao Xingjian, playwright and artist, confronts not only himself, his past, his failure to act and the relentless passivity of being human in this strange, offbeat meditation but also the idea of being alive and alone.
Part novel, part philosophical tract, and ultimately perhaps neither, the genius of Soul Mountain lies in its not attempting to offer any answers because its author does not claim to have any. "Fiction is different from philosophy " he suggests, "because it is the product of sensory perceptions . . . Furthermore, it is the same as life and does not have an ultimate goal."
Presented as a picaresque novel it instead belongs to that curious genre of intellectual quest dominated by the great German writer W.G. Sebald. Despite its length Soul Mountain never achieves either the genius or the density of The Rings of Saturn nor is it as eloquent or as evocative as Claudio Magris's graceful elegy Danube, but it certainly elevates the individual to centre stage with a freedom Chinese writers have never enjoyed. Gao Xingjian moves between the first, second and third person with deliberate abandon. He can be profound, melancholic, at times irritating, particularly during the many dialogues between variations of a warring he and she, but he is also relaxed and humorous, and frequently conversational. He appears to have been lucky in Lee as a translator, alert to the nuances of his moods and shifts in tone. However, the work would have benefited from stricter editing and could have lost 100 pages.
The narrator sets off on his travels in the heart of China following a reprieve from death. "Before this long trip, after being diagnosed with lung cancer by the doctor, all I could do every day was to go to the park on the outskirts of the city." The narrator, as was Gao Xingjian, was informed he was about to die from the same illness that killed his father. Later tests proved negative and so the narrator, already in middle-age, without a wife or child, begins a journey to find himself. Childhood and death become recurring motifs.
As he travels he discovers his country as well as himself. There are some wonderful set pieces, "So you arrive in Wuyizhen, on a long and narrow street inlaid with black cobblestones, and walking along this cobblestone street with its deep singlewheel rut, you suddenly enter your childhood, you seem to have spent your childhood in an old mountain town like this . . . Cyclists here need the skills of an acrobat . . . they cause loud swearing as they weave through people with carrying poles or pulling wooden carts . . . it is loud colourful swearing which mingles with the general din of the hawkers' calls, bargaining, joking and laughing."
As he surveys the scene he says to himself: "Had fate not otherwise decreed, you could have been born in this town, grown up and married here." He wanders on, meeting various characters, some friendly, others less so. But all the while he is observing, collecting random bits of information and stories, revisiting the history of China and encountering its natural history.
"In the maple and linden forest in the lower part of the camp, the old botanist who came with me onto the mountain discovers a giant metasequoia. It is a living fern fossil more than 40 metres high, a solitary remnant of the ice-age a million years ago, but if I look right up to the tips of the gleaming branches some tiny new leaves can be seen."
Whether in describing a crowd's reaction to the daring feats and obvious pain of an heroic young girl contortionist or in the many references to the appalling treatment of women, the face of China that emerges is a cruel one. Gao Xingjian does not sentimentalise his country. Even when admiring its natural beauty, he remains alert to the dangers such as in the sequence about giant pandas. "There was a journalist who kept going on about the giant panda being as cute as a pet cat and got into the enclosure to have his photo taken with his arms around one they'd caught at the ranger station at the foot of the mountain. He got his genitals torn off and was immediately driven to Chengdu, fighting for his life." The same old botanist in whose company the narrator admires the ancient fossil fern, has few illusions left about mankind. "This creature known as man" he says, "is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man." It is one of the sharpest comments in the book. The author appears to listen to others as closely as he does to his own heart and imagination.
There are several asides and oblique references to restrictions Gao Xingjian, who left China in 1987, has suffered during his career. He is another silenced writer and yet he is probably the least political of China's major literary figures. He wonders about the exact nature of this book and even stages a debate on this in a chapter which he later describes as optional, "but as you've read it you've read it". For all its bluntness, and the bitter exchanges between the male and female selves, this is a romantic book written by a pragmatist - though it could also be seen as a pragmatic book written by a romantic. It is also surprisingly European, possibly because the author sustains his attitude of being an outsider. Above all, he is an individual.
The theme of loneliness runs through the narrative that in turn becomes a quest. This search for self also serves to set the book beyond cultures while also succeeding in presenting the Western reader with a wonderfully broad portrait of a country caught between the ancient and the modern in a most fundamental way.
Originally published as Lingshan in Taiwan in 1990, Soul Mountain was begun in Beijing in the summer of 1982 and completed in Paris in 1989. It is a rich soup of a book. There are marvellous moments, tasty interludes and a great deal of fluid matter that could end up anywhere. The reader is constantly aware of catching the author in mid-thought. It is not a story, although there are many stories in it. The enduring moments are often the simplest, such as when he visits the home for solitary aged where he believes his barely remembered grandmother died. He arrives there and is eventually told she died 10 years earlier. "Nevertheless, I have finally visited my deceased maternal grandmother who once bought me a spinning top."
Born in 1940 soon after the Japanese invaded China, Gao Xingjian laments his dead by imagining them seated at a table to which he is yet to be invited. Interestingly, considering this book is so personal, he prevents it from becoming an oppressively contrived study of self. Instead it is a journey about an individual, any individual. It is also a diverse insight into contemporary China. Read as philosophical tract or travelogue or confession, Soul Mountain has sufficient urgency and honesty to lure the reader on a long and uneven journey of recognition.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
