Established Fiction

Corrigendum:
The third paragraph of the “established Fiction” omnibus review in the Letters in Canada 2016 issue (volume 87, issue 3), incorrectly used the adjective “nazi” to describe Maryan Filar, a musician depicted in Rhoda Rabinowitz Green’s Aspects of Nature. The second sentence should read: “of the first three stories centring on music, the third one, “Finding Maryan,” focuses on Maryan Filar, a Holocaust survivor and musician who came to Philadelphia in the 1950s; the young girl who studied with him recounts the taut dramatic story.” UTQ regrets the error. The online version has been updated.

The year 2016 saw an astounding number of fine novels published from all areas of the country – from the rural landscapes of northern Newfoundland to the rural haunts of interior British Columbia. This abundance testifies to the continuing diversity and wealth of the land's many writers. The outstanding novel of this year – indeed, of many years – is Madeleine Thien's third novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was published to national and international acclaim. Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, it was also a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Her second novel, Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), dealt with the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, and her new novel depicts the long periods of Chinese unrest spanning from Mao's revolutionary army's first battles through the Cultural Revolution to the Tiananmen massacre to life in contemporary China.

Taking its title from a Chinese translation of Eugène Pottier's nineteenthcentury workers' song, "The Internationale," "Do not say we have nothing, / We shall be masters of the world," which was the anthem of the Chinese Communist Party, the novel opens in contemporary Vancouver with Marie, also known as Jiang Li-Ling or Girl, the novel's Chinese-Canadian narrator, and her mother trying to understand a letter written in a state-sanctioned simplified Chinese, which was imposed by Chairman Mao Zedong. Marie's father, Jiang Kai, she recalls, had committed suicide in Hong Kong in 1989 by jumping from a ninth-floor hotel window when she was only ten years old; his death coincided roughly with the massacre in Tiananmen Square. As Marie ventures back in time, she remembers Ai-ming, a young girl who fled post-Tiananmen suppression for the comparative protection of Vancouver. Ai-ming's father, a famous composer named Sparrow, mentored Marie's father in the 1960s when both of them were studying at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Slowly but carefully, Marie pieces together her father's history and that of his country.

At the centre of the story are Sparrow, Jiang Kai, and Sparrow's young cousin Zhuli, a trio bound together by their devotion to classical music and to one another before the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Kai is a determined orphan from the provinces as well as a remarkable pianist. Sparrow, his teacher, is a shy but serious and important composer. And Zhuli is a gifted violinist. "It was Sparrow, she knew, who had the truest gift. His music made her turn away from the never-possible and the almost-here, away from an unmade, untested future. The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands." While the three musicians are devoted to composing and performing – and composers' works appear again and again like a quiet refrain, including Glenn Gould's two recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations – their love of Western music is suddenly outlawed in revolutionary China, it is denounced as decadence, and its adherents are branded traitors to the revolution. Each of these three people must make an important decision about living through violent assaults on their own identities.

One narrative device that appears throughout the novel is a manuscript of unknown provenance called The Book of Records, an allusion to Sima Qian's Historical Records, China's most illustrious work of history. The recounting of history in China has always been fraught with danger. Passed on from one generation to the next, The Book of Records...