Ma Jian: A story of Tiananmen Square

'What kind of country is it that punishes the victims of a massacre, rather than the people who fired the shots?" asks a character in Beijing Coma. In the course of this breathtaking novel - at once a commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre, an examination of memory and pain, and a celebration of youthful hope - Ma Jian probes the mentality of a country with a long-established history of inflicting tragedy on itself.

Dai Wei, a medical PhD student at Beijing University, has everything to look forward to. Tall, honest and reliable - "the kind of young man that many women might consider attractive" - he has survived a harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution that humiliated and ultimately destroyed his violinist father's life.

Advertisement Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms are gathering pace and there is a new prosperity in the air; Chinese students are allowed to travel abroad, and Dai Wei has relatives in America willing to sponsor his studies at Berkeley. But China is also a country ridden with corruption, and idealistic students begin to call for political reforms in Tiananmen Square.

Riding a wave of popular support, they cannot imagine that their actions will result in a tragedy that will indelibly mark each of their lives. Dai Wei is shot in the head and spends the next 10 years in a coma, during which his memories keep him alive even as his body grows weaker.

As Dai Wei's brain haphazardly pulls these recollections together, the events of the heady weeks before "6/4" are recounted in poignant detail. We see him and his friends in their dormitories chatting about Freud, parties and premature ejaculation; we see him falling in love, first with a girl from Hong Kong and then with Tian Yi, whom he nurses throughout the hunger strikes in the square; around them, there are protesters "listening to Simon & Garfunkel tapes, playing the harmonica or having games of poker".

The chatty casualness of these student conversations, with their vulgarities and witty asides, is expertly captured by Flora Drew's translation: idiomatic, lively but never exaggerated.

This euphoria turns swiftly to confusion, in-fighting and power struggles as students and workers flood into the square ("It's the trendy thing to do"); the tense final days leading to the massacre are rendered with clarity.

Part of the genius of this novel lies in Ma Jian's ability to place moments of almost slapstick comedy in scenes of true gravity. When Dai Wei has sex - against the rules - with his girlfriend in the dorm, they put a washbasin over their heads to muffle their voices, and switch on the cassette player; the tape is Nine Hundred English Sentences.

Elsewhere, the urine that Dai Wei's body produces becomes a miracle drug so famous that it even graces the pages of Le Monde. This tragi-comedy deepens the sense of humanity in the novel, and thus heightens the sense of loss we experience when we learn of fate of these characters.

These touches of hilarity are symptomatic of a novel that is richly textured and finely balanced: despite its unflinching depiction of atrocities, it is not one long hard-luck story, nor a simplistic tale of innocent students versus evil government, but a steadfast depiction of a country and a people at odds with themselves.

Some of Dai Wei's student comrades, for example, return as property magnates replete with mobile phones, having happily traded idealism for money.

Perhaps the most moving element of the novel, however, is the parallel storyline which charts Dai Wei's mother's heartbreaking struggle to keep her comatose son alive in a country that is changing at breakneck speed throughout the Nineties. They live in a squalid apartment "like scraps of paper lying in a dark corner of the street", for in this new China, the only thing that counts is material wealth.

In this prolonged study of memory and recollection, Dai Wei's body represents not just Tiananmen Square but China itself, a place where "millions of tiny cells could gather and forget themselves and, more importantly, forget the thick, oppressive walls that enclosed them". But in his stubborn refusal to surrender to death, Dai Wei also signals a change in a country more self-destructive and tragic than any other.

Once in a while - perhaps every ten years, or even a generation - a novel comes along that profoundly questions the way we look at the world, and at ourselves. Beijing Coma is a poetic examination not just of a country at a defining moment in its history, but of the universal right to remember and to hope. It is, in every sense, a landmark work of fiction.