DURING THE 1914-18 WAR IN which he was to be killed, "Saki" (HH Munro) wrote to his sister saying he would like to buy land in Siberia and live among wolves, animals that held a special fascination for him. He would have loved this novel, for the wol
ves are its heroes, but it would have left him feeling sad and bitter: it is at once a celebration of a culture that had endured for centuries, even millennia, and an account of its wilful and stupid destruction. It is quite unlike the common run of fiction. I picked it up, I confess, without enthusiasm, even with misgivings, but was quickly captivated. I urge you to read it. It is very intelligent and profoundly moving.
It is set in the grasslands of Chinese Mongolia in the 1960s, the years of the last of Mao Tse-Tung's crazy and wicked experiments: the so-called Cultural Revolution which made war on what were called "The Four Olds" – old ideas, old cultures, old customs, old habits. Students, many of them the children of disgraced officials, university professors and schoolteachers, were dispatched to distant parts of the Chinese Empire for "re-education". Chen Zhen, the hero of the novel, is one of them, a young Beijing intellectual sent with three companions to serve as a herdsman in Mongolia.
Chen will indeed be re-educated, but not in the manner intended. On the contrary, he comes to feel admiration, even reverence, for the way of life he finds there, and a desire to protect and perpetuate it against the onslaught of Mao's socialist modernity. He finds an ecological balance existing between the nomadic people, their flocks and herds, and the wolves which roam the plain. For the Mongols, the wolves are simultaneously an enemy against whom they must guard their livestock, and the favourites of Tengger, the Mongol sky god, or heaven.
Chen's mentor, Bilgee, explains the symbiotic relationship that exists between wolves and men. "I hunt them," he says, "but not often. If we killed them off, the grassland would perish" – because it would be eaten up by gazelles and other grazing animals – "and then how would we survive? This is something you Chinese cannot understand." Mongols and wolves are brothers, albeit brothers often at war with each other. When a Mongol dies, he is given a "sky-burial" – his body is exposed in the grasslands to be eaten by wolves.
Chen senses that he is being taught lessons that his modern world is ignorant of. The wolves fascinate him. He is awed by their intelligence – there are marvellous descriptions of how the wolf-pack, under the command of its leader, organises an attack on a herd of gazelles. "Chen was witness to the wolves' intelligence and patience, their organisation and discipline. Faced with a combat opportunity that came around only once in a few years, they were still able to wait patiently, keeping their hunger and their appetite in check, then disarm the enemy – the herd of gazelles – with ease." Surely, he thinks, it was from the wolves that Genghis Khan, the great Mongol conqueror, learned the art of war which enabled him to destroy empires.
It is not too much to say that Chen falls in love, not only with the Mongol people, their dogs, horses and herds, but also with the wolves, terrifying as they are. He conceives the ambition to rear a cub – the scene in which he obtains one is riveting – and persists in this ambition despite the disapproval and well-founded warning of Bilgee, whom he has come to regard as a second father. He will be left with a burden of guilt.
But there is worse to come. The Chinese authorities have no time for these "backward people" who must be brought, no matter the cost, into the modern world. Chen realises painfully that he is witness to the murder of a traditional culture, that something of rare value is being destroyed.
The author, Jiang Rong, himself spent 11 years living and working among the Mongols before becoming an academic at Beijing University, and one has the impression that there is a very strong autobiographical element in this, his first novel, written in his retirement. Certainly the evocation of life on the steppes among a people with very different ideas of the world from those he brought there seems convincingly authentic. The novel, though full of violent or, rather, savage scenes, reads like a love letter to a world that has been lost.
For in the last chapter, Chen returns to what had been the grasslands 30 years earlier, and finds everything changed. Those of his old friends who are still alive greet him with delight and make him welcome, but motorbikes have replaced the horses, brick houses the traditional yurts and there is television in every home.
Worse still, the policies of the Chinese government, encouraging crop-growing on land that is soon exhausted, and overgrazing of what is left, have turned the grasslands into desert. And the wolves have gone, all but exterminated. He knows he played a part – a small and unwilling part – in this as one of the vanguard of modernity, and there is more guilt there.
A few years later his friends tell him that "80 per cent of the Olunbulag pastureland is now desert". Soon after this telephone call, "a yellow-dragon sandstorm rose up outside his window, blocking the sky and the sun. All of Beijing was shrouded in the fine, suffocating dust. China's imperial city was turned into a hazy city of yellow sand. Standing by his window, Chen looked off to the north with a sense of desolation. The wolves had receded into legend, and the grassland was a distant memory."
It is in that "fine, suffocating dust", that atmospheric pollution, that the Olympic Games will take place this summer. But for Jiang Rong, I think, it is not only the atmosphere that has been polluted.
The full article contains 1015 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
