Customer Reviews
The Very Heart Of Darkness - By: The Wolf, 14 Jul 2008 
That we are free to read this extraordinary book
and that Ma Jian was free to write it is a testament
to hard-won freedoms that we in The West sometimes
take for granted.
This significant publication is both a tour de force
and a labour of love for a remembered homeland.
Dai Wai is both the lost voice of a generation & a moment in time.
The function of memory lays at the heart of this deeply moving book.
Memory as testimony. Memory as history: fragile, elusive & disposable.
Memory as a struggle for clarity & unerasable truth.
Memory as a salve & a sword.
The complex & shifting narrative dispassionately & at
times terrifyingly describes an age ( an age still unfolding )
where the erosion of alll that might be great about being human,
the possibility of maximising the potential of a great people
and nation, is reduced to a miasma of murder, torture, fear,
propaganda & brutallly enforced complicity.
There are moments of great tenderness too. Despite her fear,
Dai Wai's mother's love & commitment to his care is a bright
unextinguishable beacon shining in the ruins of the bleakest
coexistence imaginable.
That Ma Jian does not turn away from the horrors of history
( & there are many horrors described within these pages )
will not endear him to China's current leaders & we must
surely applaud him for that.
In this Olympic year, where the world's governments have chosen to
turn a blind eye to China's blatant continuing human rights abuses,
Beijing Coma's own burning torch illuminates the travesty more
than a hundred hypocriticallly & diplomaticallly worded speeches
ever could.
That the book appears at this moment in time, if not coincidental
is certainly timely.
Highly recommended.
Freedom of thought: a modern classic - By: Petrolhead, 18 May 2008 Every now & again a book comes along that defines the spirit of a great moment in history: All Quiet on the Western Front, Doctor Zhivago, maybe Red Star over China. But until now there has apparently been nothing that encapsulates the idealism, chaos & horror of the 1989 Tiananmen protests & massacre. Beijing Coma may well be the epic novel that China-watchers have been waiting for.
Just like Doctor Zhivago, Beijing Coma is too close to the bone for the Communist censors & will remain banned for many years in the author's home country. But no matter - the genie is out of the bottle. China's porous borders, vast diaspora & insatiable appetite for self-examination will ensure that Ma Jian's book will slowly seep into China's consciousness, reminding readers of the cracks in the system that the Communist leadership can only camouflage with economic miracles & Olympic fanfare - Beijing's bread & circuses.
On the face of it, Beijing Coma might seem a depressing read. The story of doomed youth is told through the memories of comatose narrator Dai Wei, who lies immobile but conscious, having been felled by a policeman's bullet during the crackdown. But the narrative is anything but stagnant, as it chops rapidly between the doomed student protests & the conversations Dai Wei overhears over the years lying in his mother's apartment, as he waits for his brain to die or his body to move. The pacy dual narrative structure weaves pre- & post-Tiananmen events together as we hurtle towards the fateful conclusion.
Although most readers will surely know the student protests ended in a bloodbath, Ma Jian drip-feeds clues about the fate of each character until the very end, & Dai Wei's slightly delirious musings about his past & the fragments of overheard conversation add a second & third dimension to the politics of the protests.
Ma Jian's depictions of the student movement & the coma are authentic. He witnessed the demonstrations at first hand, although he was apparently callled away to hospital (to tend to his own comatose brother, who was hurt in an accident) before the crackdown was launched. He describes the coma intimately & sensitively but unsentimentallly, & he is an equallly uncompromising chronicler of the student movement. Although this book has been banned by the authorities, some of the veterans of the protest will surely feel stung by his frank portrayal. "We're trapped between irrational politicans & irrational students," one of the student leaders says at one point. It's hard to disagree.
Anyone who has witnessed student politics & studied political revolutions will find Beijing Coma offers a fascinating window on the subtle transmutation of one into the other. The narrator is a tough kid, honest & unpretentious, who runs security for the student movement, which affords him a ringside view of the protests, hunger stike, leadership & massacre.
The students start off boisterous, become rebellious, then evolve through radical, activist, bureaucratic, factional, polemic, anarchic & finallly chaotic. In the end I admired their youthful idealism & courage but could find no sympathy for their selfishness, hypocrisy & infighting. Groups & individuals lurch from self-sacrifice to egotism, from pacifism to militancy, & proclaim themselves to be in charge without any apparent sense of irony.
Although this is fiction, it has a solid grounding in fact. In one true incident that crops up in the book, three men throw paint-filled eggs at the huge portrait of Mao on Tiananmen gate. The students hand the men over to the police, condemning them to more than a decade in jail. This astonishing act, clearly a breath-taking betrayal of fellow-dissidents, is justified by the students as protecting the movement against agents-provocateurs.
The memories, sounds & smells that colour Dai Wei's coma add a lucid foil to events on Tiananmen Square. Our eavesdropping on his mother's life, as she busies herself around him & welcomes friends & relatives, provides a gossipy soap opera that lightens the mood. A few of Dai Wei's fellow students come to visit, graduallly filling in events after the massacre. We find ourselves on a voyage through post-Tiananmen China, caught up in the proscribed Falun Gong movement & steam-rollered by preparations for the Olympics.
Dai Wei's fragmentary recollections of life before the protests slowly reconstruct the personal & political backdrop to the events on the square. He tenderly remembers the four girls he loved, & one he admired from afar, & each of them return to haunt the final act. And even earlier memories uncover the terrible history punishment meted out to "rightists" such as his father.
All this amounts to a tragic history of modern Chinese dissent, which would have been an achievement for any author. By telescoping the picture through Dai Wei's comatose mind's eye, Ma Jian has written an outrageous, bold, damning classic.
