Book review: The Day The Sun Died, by Yan Lianke

Few of us know what to make of China. We see polite and elegant, evidently well-educated young men and women on TV, products of the remarkable transformation of the country since the dark and brutal days of Chairman Mao. And yet, as the novelist Yan Lianke puts it, beneath “the bright ray of light illuminating the global East… there is a dark shadow”. The Party remains in control and the Party cannot free itself from the past. It speaks of “the Chinese dream… The great renewal of the Chinese nation,” but in this novel dreams suggest that the present is still haunted by nightmares.