Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke review: Satirist who dares to take on China puts too much weight on mysticism

A book of many faces: Yan Lianke, author of Heart Sutra. Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

A book of many faces: Yan Lianke, author of Heart Sutra. Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke

A book of many faces: Yan Lianke, author of Heart Sutra. Photo by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

Frank Lawton

March 11 2023 02:30 AM

Books are seldom brave. Most pass into the world unnoticed. Yan Lianke’s novels are different. For whatever his number of readers, Lianke can always count China’s censors among them. And for a Chinese novelist, living in Beijing, whose chief mode is satire, well, that is admirably brave.

Some of his novels have been banned outright (in the case of Summer Sunset, with the additional diktat that Lianke write “self-criticism” for six months). Most, however, are subject to an unofficial ban, with publishers prevented from printing new copies.

As Lianke’s readership has been restricted in his home country, his reputation abroad has grown via a clutch of awards, including the Kafka Prize. His latest novel, Heart Sutra, is a book of many faces. A shorthand description might be “satirical campus novel meets religious romance”, but this doesn’t quite capture the book’s ambition.

It is set in the religious centre at Beijing’s National Politics University. There, “high-ranking” Buddhists, Daoists, Protestants, Catholics and Muslims study for exams they cannot fail, and participate in tug-of-war competitions whose monetary prizes “help transform belief into faith”. The real winner of course is the Party, interested merely in deifying its own authority.

Against this satirical backdrop unfurls the love story of 23-year-old Daoist Gu Mingzheng, who dreams of worldly success, and the 18-year-old Buddhist Yahui, a devoted nun wrapped in incense and prayer. The romance is like a difficult dance, with Yahui and Mingzheng circling a room in opposite directions, eventually coming together after many missteps.

Mingzheng was abandoned at birth, and fantasises that his father may be Chairman Mao. But when he discovers his father is, in fact, a shrivelled old heretic “lying in bed as though it were a coffin”, Mingzheng takes wild, bloody action — I won’t spoil how — to sever himself from his past. For Mingzheng, remembering leads to dismembering — but also somehow serves to cut him off from the material world, and open a path to enlightenment. Yahui’s journey runs in reverse, as, encouraged by Mingzheng, she sets out from the sacred in search of the profane.

Lianke coined the term “mythorealism” to describe his writing; a genre where narrative “relies on imaginings, allegories, myths, legends, dreamscapes and magical transformations that grow out of the soil of daily life and social reality”. This lends the novel a mystical tone, though problems arise when too much of the plot’s weight is placed on these “transformations”. Quite why the pious Yahui would consider leaving the religious life she craves for a man who forces himself upon her is unclear. The protagonists’ relationship feels too tenuous to be true.

Yet Heart Sutra still has startling pleasures. In Lianke’s prose (as translated by Carlos Rojas), simile is a kind of rhythm; they are sharp, synaesthetic and anchored in the lives of the characters. So sunlight “resembled red paper immersed in clear water”, tea tastes like “a thread being sown through your tongue”, and “time passed like smoke”.

But the novelty of Lianke’s images makes it even more frustrating to find the text marred with clichés and repetitions: characters “stop in their tracks” and do things “in the blink of an eye”. Lianke’s prose is a fecund garden, but it needs a gardener — hiding in there are the seeds of a great novel, not just a brave one.