Latein The Sisters Mao, Gavin McCrea’s compendious and surprising second novel, an unexpected encounter takes place in Beijing. It is 1974, and Jiang Qing, the redoubtable wife of Chairman Mao, is taking tea with Imelda Marcos, in her heyday as the first lady of the Philippines and on a visit to communist China to attend the premiere of a revolutionary ballet.
Naturally, Marcos is done up to the nines, complete with gleaming shoes “set off by a single gold buckle” – and Jiang is, surprisingly, entranced by her waxen- faced companion, who “glowed, not with the vigour of revolutionary struggle, but as though transfused with Western blood. She shone, she burned, dangerously so, in the style of high-class productions, of colour films, of millionaire’s magazines, of Toscanini.”
Jiang must get a grip of herself, she must remind her guest that “with our model ballets, we’re waging war against feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism”. She must remember who she is and what she represents.
The scene is thoroughly theatrical – and The Sisters Mao is a novel steeped in theatricality. Unsurprisingly, the fictional Imelda Marcos represents the apotheosis of this theme; but a preoccupation with the theatre, its powers, potential, dangers and limitations is everywhere apparent. And, in the eponymous sisters, McCrea has created a trio of characters burdened by considerable personal and political histories.
In Beijing, Jiang watches Mao’s health deteriorate and plans to attack her political enemies before they can mobilise against her. Her radical ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, will function as a potent weapon of defence and denunciation. In the swinging London of 1968, sisters Eva and Iris are scions of a wealthy Tory family who have rejected their establishment roots and enlisted as members of a Maoist performance collective. The prepare an assault on a West End theatre in which their inadequately anti-establishment mother is playing the title role in a production of Miss Julie.
In both cases, the stage is conceived of both as a spectacular launch pad and as a means of vanquishing the ideologically impure. Although the political context is clear – Vietnam, the cold war, general cultural tumult – McCrea also evokes older cultural echoes to good effect.
The influence of the early socialist William Morris is evident as Eva, put to work in the printing of radical political posters for her collective, remembers her previous scorn for such bourgeois works of art: “Why,” she had grumbled, “make everything by hand when you can produce it en masse?” Now she understands the political significance of materiality, of craft wrought with time and patience. “There was dignity in it,” she muses, for all the world Morris at Kelmscott, “and no small amount of peace. Was this not how people in China lived?”
More apparent still is the influence of George Bernard Shaw, whose ideas on the political relevance of art shadow The Sisters Mao – if not always to best effect: as Shavian characters have something of a fondness for political monologue, so too do figures in this novel tend towards loquacity. This is perhaps inevitable in a novel of such scale: with a weight of material to sift and illuminate, a degree of sagging must occur.
Take one London scene, in which characters fret at length over the perils of ersatz colonial borrowing: “We’re sailing very close to chinoiserie, aren’t we? To the kind of cultural imperialism we’re supposed to despise?” Back and forth they go: and there is only so much such dialectics that a novel can support.
McCrea has noted that he “did not set out to write a novel of China”. Indeed, the China that emerges from the pages of The Sisters Mao is rather a stage upon which politics and cultural identity are explored with respect and insight. The historical Madame Mao was an arresting and complex figure: and the fictional Jiang of this novel is likewise a creation of some stature, and an indicator of the earnestness that McCrea has brought to the fraught task of cultural borrowing.
That the English sisters are rather less compelling characters is perhaps the point: for all of their sorrows and indignant politics, Iris and Eva nevertheless play at life in comparison with Jiang, who must labour ceaselessly to secure her destiny – or face possible death.
In the world of The Sisters Mao, as in life itself, ideas flow ceaselessly and impact in ways unexpected and uncontrollable – and this conception of the world brings with it a degree of comfort, as well as fear.
