The Book of Records
Madeleine Thien, WW Norton & Company, £9.99

THIS new novel by former Booker nominee Madeleine Thien, tells the story of Lina, a refugee. She and her father abandoned China when it was flooded and now live in a shape-changing future colony, the Sea. Lina survives by reading the stories of great figures from history, the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, the theist philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and refugee intellectual from Nazi-occupied Europe, Hannah Arendt.

The book comes highly recommended, and has been praised for its vision of the world of our future, one in which climate change and refugee migration will be more common. But it does suffer certain weaknesses.

In general, Thien seems to be far more determined to create a particular mood than she is interested in narrative. The most memorable of stories-within-a-story, in the history of fiction, are those where something is at stake. In One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade must keep telling tales or she will be murdered. Lina, by contrast, is a passive character — a less vivid presence in the narrative the longer the book goes on.

I enjoyed Du Fu’s attempt to serve the Emperor, the moments of his promotion (achieved not by praising the crown but by pointing out is weaknesses), the passages describing his artistic creativity and its relationship to defeat. However, Spinoza was poorly served by Thien’s refusal to engage with his philosophical breakthroughs, and her seeming inability to identify or explain them. 

The narratives of Arendt’s life suffer even more keenly from the same weakness, a problem compounded by Thien’s seeming desire to narrate an untold story. It’s pointless trying to do that with Arendt, confidant of Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, when is she is already one of the most familiar of 20th century lives.

Late in the book, we learn of Lina’s father’s life in contemporary China, his struggles with censorship, and you begin to feel the possibility of a more compelling narrative.

Too often, though, Thien’s book is other things: languid, abstract — a raft without a passenger, a boat lost at sea.