Music and Politics in China

It is extraordinary that Montreal-based author Madeleine Thien has the guts and stamina to keep writing about the things she keeps writing about. Her first novel, Certainty, explored the trauma of life in Northern Borneo under Japanese occupation in the Second World War. She followed that with Dogs at the Perimeter, a searing dissection of Cambodia during the nightmarish Khmer Rouge years of the 1970s. Now, in Do Not Say We Have Nothing, her most ambitious work to date, she tracks the lives of three gifted musicians, plus their families and friends, through the tumultuous decades of Mao Zedong’s China and its troubled aftermath. All these novels use as their framework the quiet, enigmatic lives of survivors or their children in Canada, where characters mine the past incessantly even as they try to envisage a healthier, more hopeful, more “normal” future.

For readers who prefer their novels to be about something rather than an ever deeper...