The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 31 October 2013
by Eliot Pattison
Urumqi is the largest city in western China, the capitol of the Xinjiang region of northern mountains and vast deserts surrounding the Silk Road. It is also a city of nearly three million people, and has long sat on the list of most polluted cities in the world (which is saying something, considering China's recent problems with thick coal smoke pollution). But this is symbolic of what incredibly rapid development does to a place when committed by a government determined to become a first world economy, and which has few impediments to bulldozing and appropriating the regional history and its peoples. Urumqi is peripheral to this novel, but its story is reflected in smaller ways throughout the real and fictional locales through which Eliot Pattison takes us.
This book is the sequel to Pattison's The Skull Mantra, and in it, we again join Chinese dissident, Shan Tao Yun, as he makes his way across the Tibetan and Xinjiang political and geographic landscape. Shan has been approached to investigate the murders of orphan children in a border region populated by Tibetans, Kazakhs, Tadjiks, Chinese, Uighurs and even the Eluosi, the small population of ethnic Russian Chinese citizens. It is a wild place, of vast desolate deserts populated by shepherds and nomadic Kazakh horsemen. A group of orphan children has been settled amongst a number of clan communities, and a teacher of Tibetan descent brings them together for their classes. But, one by one, the boys are being murdered. Eventually, also the teacher. Why anyone would find these boys a threat is one of Shan's biggest puzzles. He, himself, is supposed to be in the custody of the state, confined to one small region of Tibet, but he sneaks away with a group of unlikely Tibetan companions. His journey takes him through the intricate political landscape of modern China, a Communist nation integrating the most useful tenets of Capitalism while maintaining central control over people's lives. The various nomadic tribes are deemed wasteful to the state, their flocks of sheep and herds of horses confiscated, their cultural history progressively wiped out by people who will go so far as to falsify genetic evidence of the distinctness of the region's peoples. It is a brutal environment in which to be a dissident, and in which to be a victim of a political crime. Thus, Shan's investigation is often labored, obstructed, and even depressing to the reader. It is a dark and unhappy land through which he moves. And he moves often and far. While the central plot of the tale is engrossing, it is often bogged down in frequent treks across the forbidding landscape of the Taklamakan desert and the Kunlun mountains. The book is slowed by these passages, which are sometimes repetitive. Indeed, the story would have been aided by a map of Shan's trek through the real as well as fictional countryside. At the same time, Pattison is using this device to display the region's incredibly long and rich history, the historical artefacts that remain (such as the kerez, a vast network of underground irrigation channels more than a thousand years old and stretching for thousands of kilometers). He uses this platform to tell the bleak tale of minority populations in the path of Chinese development. And he lays out the plight of the Tibetan culture, as well, under ongoing threat in a viciously modernizing country. Will the murders of the boys have larger implications? Or are they to become footnotes on a much bigger stage? It is hard to say, once the reader makes it through the dense and deliberate novel. And yet, it is rich beyond probability in the author's determination to tell us of the many angles and complexities of life in this region largely unknown to Western audiences. Shan and his many companions make up a crowd, but they are an engagingly diverse group to spend time with in this novel.
Also by Pattison: [The Skull Mantra]