The Day the Sun Died

Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas

Text Publishing

Otago Daily Times, October 27th 2018

Chinese author has Yan Lianke likening himself to a blind man who carries a flashlight to guide others through the night, hoping to make both their destination and the darkness visible. Many of his novels, including The Day The Sun Died – which won Hong Kong highest literary award in 2016 – are banned on the mainland because they explore the negative consequences of China’s rapid modernization on minority populations.

The events described in this novel, which take place over the course of a single, prolonged night during which the inhabitants of the fictitious town of Gaotian are afflicted by a form of mass somnambulism, render this darkness literally as well as figuratively real. At first the villagers perform such routine daily tasks as harvesting their fields, but as night deepens and they sink further into sleep, sporadic acts of violence break out as people begin to act on their deeper fantasies and desires. Meanwhile those who remain awake take the opportunity to steal from the dreamers, and, when people from the surrounding countryside flood into town it quickly becomes a war zone.

The writing is so rich in theme and imagery that it is almost closer to poetry than prose and contains far more than can be unpacked in this brief review, but is exemplified through the voice of its narrator. Although Yan appears in the novel (a writer bereft of inspiration whose long, boring books neither move nor comfort the reader), he is unable to tell the story himself. It is told in his stead by 14-year-old Li Niannian who, either because he is a self-described idiot or because of his innocence, is immune to the sleeping sickness. He and his father, Tianbao, spend the night desperately trying to awaken their fellow townspeople. But their successes provide only temporary respite and, when the sun fails to rise at its usual time, Tianbao sacrifices himself to create a false dawn, leaving his son as sole witness to the tragedy.

Niannian describes what he sees in vivid, concrete detail that invites the reader to share his experiences in deeply physical terms, the brutality of his testimony heightened by the lyric quality of its delivery and the juxtaposition of the poetic and profane. When they come across dead man, whose body and blood are mixed together as though “trying to wash himself by crawling through the mire” the boy is struck by the way his father’s voice is “as tall a tree…like a ladder reaching the sky and leaning against the clouds, such that people could use it to grasp the moon and stars.” Dreamwalkers’ faces are like bricks, blocks of wood, “a book full of miswritten characters that no one could read”, their eyes “like two pieces of dirty white cloth…pupils resembled drops of ink that had fallen onto the cloth”. The night is “both moving and congealed…water coloured moonlight resembled boiled swill that had not yet cooled”. It is impossible to read such a passage and not feel the air’s suffocating touch on your skin.

Whilst The Day The Sun Died is a direct criticism of Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream initiative, it also speaks to universal aspects of human nature. Given the opportunity to act out their deepest desires, dreamwalkers are in some ways more themselves than when awake. Some characters are driven by altruistic impulses, but the majority of sleepers are like sheep who will follow any leader if given somewhere to eat and sleep and make money, and those who remain awake pretend to be dreaming in order to take advantage of others or to protect themselves from attack.

Although the novel ends on a hopeful note it is far from clear that Yan shares such optimism; his own character’s writing in unreadable and his intervention at the climax of the story leads to directly to Tianbao’s death. Such self-criticism could not be further from the truth, however. His confronting, multi-layered novel is hauntingly beautiful and, in a world where reality is increasing difficult to distinguish from illusion, its light is desperately needed.