
“Why did Busoni transcribe Bach? How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before?”
So ponders the narrator, Marie, near the end of this long, but never slow, novel. As a child living in Canada, her beloved father, Chinese by birth, committed suicide in Hong Kong in 1989. Not long after, her mother received a letter from the wife of her father’s best friend in China, begging Marie’s mother’s help to smuggle her teenage daughter to Canada. Although the child Marie does not understand the reasons for these events, it is implied that the daughter, Ai-Ming, has been involved somehow in the Tiananmen Square protests. After her arrival Ai-Ming discovers a notebook in Marie’s home filled with elegant Chinese calligraphy, and begins to tell the story of the Book of Records.
This novel is epic in scope, covering in various degrees the history of China from the aftermath of the Communist Revolution, through the famines during the Great Leap Forward when millions starved to death, lingering in the Cultural Revolution and the suppression of thought and movement that it entailed, and jumping to the protests of 1989, when free thought briefly seemed possible, while occasionally returning to the present-day and Marie’s search for information about her father and about Ai-Ming, who disappeared after returning to China for her mother’s funeral. Through all of these events, its focus is on their effects on a group of musicians, chief among them Ai-Ming’s father, Sparrow, a composer and teacher at the Shanghai conservatory before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
Interwoven into the story of Sparrow’s family is the Book of Records, originally a novel transcribed by his uncle, Wen the Dreamer, as a gift for his aunt, Wen’s wife Swirl. The Book takes on different significances throughout the novel, being copied and recopied multiple times; having its ending reimagined by Wen (since the original was lost); having names added to it or replaced to commemorate those lost in real life who cannot be openly referred to; being used as a signpost to reunite lost family members. Like the history of the revolution, it becomes part story, part fact, a copy of a copy whose original state has long since been lost, a sign of both the brutal repetition of history and the possibility of escaping from it.
This novel functions beautifully as a family epic story of 20th century China, and it is entirely possible to read it only on that level. However, it also functions as a meditation on the meaning of music and artistic thought, of freedom, and the circumstances in which it is possible; of the significance of silence. Marie, a mathematician, reflects also on the nature of zero, a point from which measurement begins on each side, a nothingness that can be taken from any quantity an infinite number of times; in Beijing, architecturally, this point is the Square.
This is not a novel for the faint-hearted. Many atrocities are committed within its covers. I also found that it helped to have a very basic knowledge of the history of Communist China – reading a couple of Wikipedia entries will do the trick, and will greatly enhance the reader’s grasp of the broader significance of the key events. Read while listening to Glenn Gould play the Goldberg Variations.
Trigger warnings: suicide, police and military violence against civilians.