"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows an unorthodox structure to explore at a personal level two social/political paroxysms suffered by China in the 20th Century: the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard scourge of the mid 1960s and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. These two iron-fisted crackdowns battered and splintered a family of musicians and poets, members of which had to flee to the desert of Kyrgyzstan, were driven to suicide, or were murdered by the People’s Liberation Army at Tiananmen. At its core, then, the novel exposes mob rule and official paranoia for the horrors that they are, and shines a spotlight on Chinese character, with its youthful impatience for change and its view of justice, and the blind, intolerant authoritarian reactions to such impulses.

The novel gains its power by unfolding this intractable and unfortunate conflict from the inside out: Ba (daddy) Lute and Big Mother Knife head a tight-knit family of musicians and itinerant storytellers which becomes ground into the dirt — hounded as fugitives, driven to suicide, or simply murdered by troops. The blind, impersonal machinery of the authoritarian gods functions in strokes broad and minuscule, and crushes creativity that would never harm a rational regime.

Thien introduces each chapter with a few pages portraying events in the immediate past — the novel was published in 2016 in Canada — and from the viewpoint of Mali, a young woman of Chinese birth who immigrated to Vancouver with her mother in the 1990s. This device grounds the narrative in the present and gives it weight. The framing of the main story this way gives it an exalted, poetic feel, and the characters a heroic tenor. These are the strengths of this very accomplished piece.

This novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and this reminded me of the type of fiction honored by the Nobel Committee: its politics clearly reflected those of the Committee, while the writing, though effective, doesn’t always soar to the artistic — character, plot, image, structure, diction — heights of other deserving novels. It’s a powerful, plaintive, memorable novel, make no mistake. As a first-hand narrative of paranoid, cynical, out-of-ideas leadership fomenting groupthink, theft and murder on the part of mindless, lawless mobs, I’ve never read its equal. And probably never will again.