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Su Tong has the dubious honour of being best known not for his own work but for the film Raise the Red Lantern, adapted from one of his novellas. But at 46, one of China's more established writers has scooped the world's youngest major prize, The Man Asian Literary Award, with this, his seventh novel.
"It's just a novel centring on the fate of people caught in an absurd time," Su Tong has said. Absurd indeed, for The Boat to Redemption returns us to Maoist China, with a set of characters almost completely shorn of political motives and convictions, driven by little more than their immediate wants, sexual needs and desire to rise above the others.
In this, perhaps, Su Tong is reflecting modern China. "Buns are made of flour, and that comes from wheat, which is planted by peasants. Our mother's a peasant, so some of this belongs to her," Dongliang is told as his lunch is stolen.
Young Dongliang's concern is not the Cultural Revolution but his parents' failing marriage and his burgeoning sexuality. The fate of his family is dictated by an event that happened before Liberation: a beautiful communist activist is killed and her son lost to the river. His identity is unknown, but when it is known that he had a fish-shaped birthmark, suddenly everyone in town has a fish-shaped birthmark.
In the end Dongliang's father is identified as the martyr's son, and on the strength of his birthmark he rises to become an official in the local Communist Party, where he happily abuses his position with women, long after his marriage to a beautiful political performer who reads the news on the radio.
Then, in a parody of the political movements of the time, an investigation into the father's birthmark declares he is not the son of the martyr after all, but the bastard son of river pirate Feng Four. The family's fortunes plummet. This is a book that is talking first of all to the Chinese, who are still working out how best to relate to that absurd – and not-so-distant – past.
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