Last of the Mongolians

WOLF TOTEM

By Jiang Rong

Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt

The Penguin Press. 527 pp. $26.95

A Chinese publishing phenomenon has hit American bookshelves in the form of Jiang Rong's "Wolf Totem." This novel has sold more copies in China than any other book ever published, with the exception of Mao's "Little Red Book" and is the inaugural winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize. Many have wondered how "Wolf Totem" -- which takes place in Inner Mongolia during the height of the Cultural Revolution and is highly critical of Chinese government and Chinese character -- managed to avoid censorship. A greater wonder is its popularity.

The book opens with the protagonist, a Chinese student named Chen Zhen, who has gone to re-educate himself with the Mongols, in the company of the wise Mongolian elder, Old Man Bilgee. They are hidden on a snow-blown ridge and watch as a pack of wolves stalk and kill a herd of gazelles. The scene is gripping, told with precision and flair. Subsequent scenes are no different and range from portraits of village life to communal hunts to what is probably the best scene in the book, which involves the massacre of a herd of horses.

But none of these various episodes moves the book forward. "Wolf Totem" is supposed to be a novel of education: It begins with Chen Zhen's ignorance about wolves and Mongols, plods through scene after scene, until the novel arrives at the cataclysmic finale where, everything about life on the Steppes having been thrown off-balance by the destruction of the wolves, the Mongolian way of life has been destroyed as well.

This is as much summary as is necessary in a novel that is little more than a frothy torrent of didacticism, jumping from one obvious insight to another on its way to the last page. Quite simply, the novel says: Education, when it comes, comes too late. The novel ends with an elegy for the wolf, the Mongol and Mongol worldview, all of which, Jiang Rong suggests, have been destroyed by the brutally blind policies of the Cultural Revolution. And while this conclusion is hard to argue with, "Wolf Totem" leaves the reader, this one anyway, annoyed and unsatisfied.

Jiang Rong is the pseudonym of an author who claims to have spent 11 years in Mongolia between 1967 and 1978. "Wolf Totem" is the result of that time spent with Mongolians and wolves.

I've seen and met wolves, both timber wolves and the more common brush wolf, in the wilds around my home in northern Minnesota. I've seen arctic wolves up close and personal in Nunavut, on the northwest coast of Hudson Bay. I have lived for a year with Ojibwe hunters who trap and shoot wolves to make their living. The kinds of wolf behavior and wolf qualities tabulated in "Wolf Totem" owe nothing to real wolves and owe more to easy allegory. And these allegorical beings end up tamping out all the excitement created by the book's fascinating subject and able description.

And just when the scenes threaten to jump out of their pens and turn into an unruly and lively novel, the characters stop, turn and address one another in some of the most stilted dialogue in recent memory: "I'll bet not one in a hundred thousand Chinese has ever actually touched a living grassland wolf. We hate them, which means we hate whatever they're good at," muses a Chinese student deep in the novel. Chen Zhen responds:

"In world history . . . nomads have been the only Easterners capable of taking the fight to the Europeans, and the three peoples that really shook the West to its foundations were the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols. The Westerners who fought their way back to the East were all descendants of nomads. The builders of ancient Rome were a pair of brothers raised by a wolf. Images of the wolf and her two wolf-children appear on the city's emblem even today. The later Teutons, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons grew increasingly powerful, and the blood of wolves ran in their veins. The Chinese, with their weak dispositions, are in desperate need of a transfusion of that vigorous, unrestrained blood. Had there been no wolves, the history of the world would have been written much differently. If you don't know wolves, you can't understand the spirit and character of the nomads, and you'll certainly never be able to appreciate the differences between nomads and farmers or the inherent qualities of each." While one character among many could very well be a pedant, must they all sound like this?

Pedantic or not, in the final analysis, "Wolf Totem" becomes more about race-baiting than wolf-baiting. Summaries of racial characteristics float from these characters' mouths with the greatest of ease (Chinese bad, Mongolian good). Perhaps "Wolf Totem" has been successful in China for precisely the same reason that James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales," not known for elegance or subtlety, were popular in the first half of the 19th century: It's safe and pleasing to look back on a landscape and a life that the nation-state has largely destroyed. One might even locate this cycle of destruction and romantic celebration as an early step in the literature of emerging capitalist nations. So while "Wolf Totem" seems to praise Mongolian life and the wild animals that inform that life, the wolf must die and be replaced with a novel that comes nowhere near the creature in terms of beauty and importance, and instead reads like a 500-page-long metaphor.