"wolf totem"

…from today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Jiang's 'Totem' relies on Mongolia fascination
by Alan Cheuse

Sunday, March 16, 2008

"Wolf Totem" by Jiang Rong; translated by Howard Goldblatt
The Penguin Press; 527 pages; $26.95

When Jiang Rong's first novel, "Wolf Totem," was published in China in 2004, it became an immediate best-seller, with more than 2 million copies in print. You don't have to read very far into the book to discover why. It's an intellectual adventure story about a young Beijing academic named Chen Zhen who, just before the Cultural Revolution, uproots himself to participate in an agricultural project in the vast grasslands of Inner Mongolia, one of China's far-flung districts. The story introduces the main character to Mongolian culture - a densely intertwined weave of people, horses, sheep, grass, snow and wolves; speculates on the wisdom of China's attempts to take it over; and offers, overall, a eulogy to this once-ferocious and remote way of life.

Most of Chen Zhen's Mongolian mentors have one foot in the old way of life, which has prevailed for thousands of years: worshiping the sky god, Tengger, and in death giving their bodies over as food for the wolves. The other foot - if not wholly, then at least up to the big toe - is in the bureaucratized world of Mao's revolution. They put their energy into the maintenance of the ancient ecological cycles of the grasslands, in which wolves participate with the intensity, strength and ferocity of their natures.

And forget Sun Tzu's treatise "The Art of War." The practices of the wolf pack offered important instruction on military tactics that, as the contemporary Mongolians see it, once guided hugely outnumbered but mostly triumphant Mongol armies across Asia to the gateways of Europe. More important, the wolves winnow the gazelle herds that otherwise would chew the grasslands to the roots, thereby destroying the ecology of the region.

Wolves thus stand - or prowl, as the metaphor might have it - at the center of Mongolian life. Without them, no agriculture, and without agriculture, no food. Chen Zhen soon becomes well tutored in the wolves, their powers and appetites, their family and pack loyalties, their hungers and their leaders' tactical brilliance. And the novel itself gives us some major set-pieces about these totemic beasts, including their slaughter of army horses in the midst of a terrifying blizzard, a foray into a wolf den in search of pups, and a huge Chinese-driven wolf hunt in retaliation for their slaughter of the horses.

All of this we read about in great detail, as if the novelist were convinced that the reader will become as fascinated with wolves and Mongolian life as his Chinese student protagonist.

He's quite right to do so. Although it has its longueurs (particularly having to do with Chen Zhen's raising of a wolf cub he extricates from a caveside den), for the most part the novel brilliantly executes its story at the literal level - we as readers learn along with the visiting Chinese students - and turns symbolic with a convincing vengeance when we find ourselves nearly snow-blind, with the local elders, in a vicious world of red tooth and claw or watching with horror as the larger Chinese culture encroaches on this muscle-tough but ecologically fragile 2,000-year-old way of life.

Five hundred bloody and instructive pages later, you just want to stand up and howl!

Alan Cheuse is a novelist and book commentator for National Public Radio.