As ponderous as a Russian novel and twice as exhausting, Yan Lianke’s The Day the Sun Died is an old-fashioned, feel-bad political satire of the folkloric Animal Farm persuasion. A night of mass somnambulism, or ‘dreamwalking’, as it is called in Chinese, serves as a metaphor for the casual horror perpetrated by the Jinping regime, and the lethal consequences of ignoring it in the name of survival.
Li Niannian is a self-confessed idiot of adolescent years who resides in Gaotian Village, which may also be called Gaotian Town. He spends his days helping his parents run their funerary shop and reading novels written by his crazy neighbour, Yan Lianke (yep. You saw what he did there). When the night of ‘the great somnabulism’ begins, Gaotian Village is struggling with the new government policy of forced cremation, and the desecration of tombs that occurs when a family is found to be in violation of this law. Whenever there is a new death, Niannian’s father, Li Tianbao, informs on the villagers to his brother-in-law, a government official and crematorium owner whose proclivities include producing oil from cremated corpses and smashing the bones of partially cremated bodies in front of their families if insufficient money has been paid to him. Li Tianbao’s guilt, made all the more terrible by his knowledge of the inhuman practices that go on at the crematorium, is just one secret that comes to the fore on the night that the villagers begins to dreamwalk, and quickly progress from engaging in normal, daytime activities to doing what that they would never dream of doing while awake.
The intensely private nature of the desires the villagers act upon while dreamwalking gives the reader the constant feeling that he is watching something that he is not supposed to see. The inhabitants of Gaotian walk the streets and fields freely confessing ruinous, taboo desires, or owning up to long-concealed sins against their fellows. In many cases, the villagers on the receiving end of this horrible honesty do not wish to listen. They push the confessing person away and turn their backs on the hideous beatings and murders taking place in the public square with equal enthusiasm. As the violence gradually intensifies, ignorance becomes harder to achieve, and the numbers of sentient, awake humans become fewer and fewer. Niannian and his family are alone and adrift in a sea of mayhem, their innocence and wakingness not enough to keep them alive. Survival becomes contingent on participation, and death seems to be the only thing that can make the sun come up again.
The somnambulism is an incredibly powerful metaphor for how keeping oneself blind to injustice is no guarantee of survival under a dictatorial regime. One cannot unsee the actions of those moving happily, asleep, through the Chinese dream, their hands and bodies performing what their natural, waking selves would find unthinkable. Succumbing to the dream, however horrible it may be, is far less trouble than attempting to end it, but the more dreamwalkers there are, the worse the nightmare becomes. Yan, with his masterful build-up of horror, violence, almost-redemptions and subsequent damnations, demonstrates this with hideous clarity, his simple use of language conveying his complex message in stark, awful detail.
The Day the Sun Died is the kind of book that causes a noticeable lifting of mood each time it is closed and put away. It is no one’s idea of a walk in the park. However, like other gruesome political satires, the book provides a necessary reflection, however unpleasant, on the consequences of thought control, and how suppressing an idea can be just as bad as promoting it.
LADYGILRAEN 