Ghost Cities – Siang Lu

Have you heard of the great ghost cities of China? There’s around 50 of them, municipalities of varying sizes, huge newly-developed properties all mostly uninhabited. They’re a phenomenon that clearly fascinate Siang Lu, as they inspired his new novel Ghost Cities, which he was kind enough to send me for review.

There are two main storylines in Ghost Cities. First, there’s Xiang, a young man living in Sydney and newly fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate. See, Xiang is a “bad Chinese”; he doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin, and he’s been skating by at work by simply feeding documents into Google Translate. He’s at a bit of a loose end when he meets big-shot Chinese director Baby Bao, who offers him a new job and a new life on a film set he’s built in one of China’s empty cities, Port Man Tou (and yes, that’s an exceedingly clever fictional city name).

The second storyline is more of an allegorical fable, about an ancient Emperor and his increasingly desperate grip on power. Over the course of Ghost Cities, the Emperor destroys all the books in the Imperial City (only for a disappeared concubine to replicate them page by page in her hiding place at the heart of a labyrinth), creates a thousand doubles of himself to cheat death (only for some of them to take his place in a more formal capacity), and hosts a great feast for the poor to find himself a new taste tester (all the dishes are poisoned, and the lone survivor will be given the job).

So, yes, Ghost Cities gets a little weird – strong Italo Calvino vibes, for readers who like that sort of thing. I found myself most drawn to the Port Man Tou story, where the city-cum-film-set is revealed to be a contemporary panopticon that blurs the line between life and art. Even as the story grows increasingly surreal and dystopian, the tone remains sharp and wry, a tricky tightrope that only the most masterful storytellers can walk without falling.

Read Ghost Cities on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)