From the inventive and intellectual imagination of author Siang Lu comes the extraordinary novel GHOST CITIES (UQP 2024), a dichotomous tale of ancient China and a contemporary abandoned (or ghost city) set in modern-day China.
Two very different stories that nonetheless magnetically pull towards each other throughout the novel in terms of themes and ideas. This parable is thought-provoking, creative, disturbing, clever, extremely funny, ironic and satirical, and includes everything from blossoming romance to authoritarian regimes, from concubines to emperors, from the simple labour of peasants and artisans to the machinations and intrigue of court life.
This book is so astute and witty and combines so many different threads which each circle round to tie themselves in knots, that when I reached the end, I wanted to immediately return to the beginning and reread to discover the hints and clues I had missed or misunderstood on my first reading.
The Ghost Cities of the title are real-life vacant, uninhabited or abandoned megacities in China, built for various reasons of thriving infrastructure or predicted population increases, but which remain empty. In the contemporary thread of the novel, young man Xiang (subsequently known as #BadChinese) is fired from his job as a translator at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney when it is discovered that not only does he not understand, speak, read or write a single word of Chinese, but he has been relying on Google Translate to complete his everyday work. He attracts the attention of a famous Chinese film director who has colonised a ghost city to use as a giant film set, with all the actors being citizens, and all the citizens also being actors. In a weird combination of Big Brother and The Truman Show, the fantasy of movieland blends with reality until people – including Xiang – can’t tell one from the other, even as he (as #BadChinese) is touted as the next big attraction and social media star.
Interspersed with these modern chapters are fascinating insights into ancient China, where a paranoid and vain Emperor creates a thousand doubles of himself (which creates not unexpected problems) and then tries to execute these doubles (which creates even more trouble). There is a fantastical automaton that plays a superb game of chess, and a sentient mountain. Woven throughout is the story of how every book in the Empire is destroyed by royal decree (along with all the chickens) and then recreated, page by painstaking page, by a hidden fugitive who values love and art above all else. There is the narrative of the highly skilled artisan who builds artworks on a grand scale as well as tiny, hyper-realistic miniatures.
Threaded into these intellectual and complex tales are the universal themes of love, loss, family, sacrifice, belonging, revenge, loyalty, betrayal, desire, passion, death, ascendency, art, order, ambition, totalitarianism, poetry, romance, friendship, bureaucratic red tape, Kafkaesque situations, dreams, reincarnation and the circular nature of life, all on a grand national and community scale and also on the smaller scale between individuals.
We are introduced to a huge cast of characters that come and go and then reappear again later in the novel after we thought they had long been dispatched. Government edicts are proclaimed and renounced and re-introduced. Nonsense rules are regulated, and commonsense solutions are avoided, due to the vanity, pride, ignorance or self-esteem issues of certain characters.
I sense that if the author was grilled about the underlying themes and questions behind the multitude of stories encased in this novel, we would uncover layers of meaning and subtext that are not apparent on the first reading, and might only be discovered – as in the novel itself – by hours of study and a hypersensitivity to hidden implications, subtle signposts and sage portents.
Ghost Cities is an allegorical, lyrical and poignant novel that questions authority, individuality, ambition, relationships and ancestral bonds. A highly entertaining and thrillingly complex read.