Tai Bai Jin Xing You Dian Fan by Ma Boyong

Ma Boyong’s new work. Excellent, recommended. In the afterword he says it is a leisure piece, and it indeed reads smoothly and recreationally. I finished it in two days and could not put it down. Personally, I think its quality is second only to the long novel Mystery of Antiques, and better than The Longest Day in Chang’an, The Longest Day in Chang’an: Fifteen Days in Two Capitals, The Lychees of Chang’an, I Read Too Little, Do Not Lie to Me, and The Ming Dynasty Under the Microscope. I have read quite a few of Prince Ma’s books. He counts as my favorite contemporary Chinese writer. Among writers whose books I can read this many of, abroad there is also Keigo Higashino, and domestically there is Jin Yong.

It deconstructs one of the four great classical novels, Journey to the West. With insight into human nature and officialdom, the story it writes is actually more convincing than the original and more in line with modern narrative. Miscarriages of justice, factional struggles, and checks and balances of power are all brought out vividly. I heard a theory very early on, probably on early Zhihu, that the reason Sun Wukong caused havoc in Heaven was that Heaven deliberately made it happen. By taking advantage of the incident, various departments could shift blame onto the Great Sage Equal to Heaven, especially the underworld’s Register of Life and Death, which probably already had many loopholes, so they used the opportunity to destroy evidence. Tai Bai happens to expand this view, using the performance of the journey to fetch scriptures to reveal the truth behind the Havoc in Heaven 500 years earlier. It expands the idea into a 100,000-character novella. The writing is humorous and makes one laugh, but thinking carefully is terrifying. It contains no small amount of exposing reality and satirizing the present through the past, while also being full of Ma Boyong’s usual compassion, suspense, and reversals.