Immensely good fun

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
Mo Yan

A friend lent me this book with enthusiastic recommendation. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, I therefore began it with a sense of trepidation; I’m always fearful, in such situations, that I’ll dislike the book and awkwardly have to confess that, actually, no, I didn’t love it.

My fear was of course groundless: my friend has excellent taste and knows me well. It wasn’t long before I realised this book would be immensely good fun. Its protagonist, Ximen Nao, is reincarnated first as a donkey, then as an ox, a pig, a dog and finally a monkey. Through the eyes of these animals (although at times also through the eyes of other narrators), we hear the story of Ximen village from 1950 to almost the present day. This, then, is a history of China and the animal perspective allows it to be a satirical one – human actions are portrayed as absurd and mystifying. Ximen Pig tells us “everything about this world befuddles me, I’ll tell you that”.  

My favourite sections of this novel were those in which the animal narrators describe their animal states. I found Ximen Nao’s transformation into a pig especially entertaining. At first, disgusted at the prospect of his latest “filthy and shameful” reincarnation, he refuses to feed, realising “the minute I put my mouth around that sow’s teats, I’d be seized by pig-ness”. By the end of the page, however, he’s exclaiming “yow! My god! I never would have believed that a sow’s milk, my mother sow’s milk, could be so delicious, so fragrant, like silk, like love itself”.

As well as humour, the novel also has its share of poignant moments. The conclusion of the ox’s story was, I found, incredibly moving. I never imagined I’d be quite so emotionally moved by the actions of an ox, but I was.

I do have to admit, though, that this book’s length sometimes got the better of me. It’s long. 540 big pages long. The kind of book that can make your wrists ache if you read too much in one go. It is very much an epic, with a vast cast of human characters and a broad historical span (it ends with the turn of the millennium). I confess that I skimmed some sections. I was invested in the animals, completely, and eager to hear of their fates; their observations of their human counterparts sometimes, to me, seemed to be getting in the way.

But for a book this long, I think a little skimming is kind of inevitable. For the most part, it delighted me.