The Book of Records
by Madeleine Thien
In Madeleine Thien’s rapturous fourth novel, The Book of Records, “the Sea” is the name given to a gargantuan migrant compound, sprawled on the shoreline a decade or two in the future. Lina and her ailing father, Wui Shin, occupy an apartment on the labyrinthine 12th floor, from where they can watch the refugee boats pull in and depart. The pair have fled the flooded Pearl River Delta, leaving behind Lina’s mother, brother and aunt but carrying three volumes from an epic biographical series entitled The Great Lives of Voyagers. These tattered instalments cover the respective histories of the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, the Chinese poet Du Fu and the Portuguese-Jewish scholar Baruch Spinoza.
Lina will go on to spend many years in the Sea, but as the book begins, the girl has no sooner settled into her apartment than the doors slide open to reveal her neighbours. The refugees gather around the new arrival like Dorothy’s companions in The Wizard of Oz. They breezily introduce themselves as Jupiter, Bento and Blucher, but they are also the avatars of Du Fu, Spinoza and Arendt. It is through their stories that we learn how Spinoza was labelled a heretic in 17th-century Amsterdam and Arendt went to ground in Nazi-occupied France. “You do know a lot about Du Fu,” Lina tells Jupiter at one point. “What am I,” Jupiter replies, “other than the things I know?”
The Book of Records is a rich and beautiful novel. It’s serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change. If this turbulent, mercurial tale has an anchor, it is its belief that “in order to extend life and preserve civilisation, we are obliged to rescue one another”. Thien explains in the acknowledgments that she has lifted this quote from The Book of Mountains and Rivers, a 2012 essay collection by the Chinese writer Yu Qiuyu. She hands it on from Arendt to Blucher to Lina in the Sea, as though it’s a baton or a lifeline that connects all the world’s great voyagers. Xan Brooks
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