Beijing Letter:Wolf Totem, a novel about a Red Guard living with Mongolian nomads during the tumultuous period of Chinese history known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), was the biggest publishing sensation in years when it was published here in 2004, writes Clifford Coonan
Next month, it will be published in Ireland and Irish readers will be able to make what they will of this remarkable book, which has been read as a Communist Dances With Wolves, a guide to doing business in new China, an ecological handbook, or a piece of military strategy.
In China it cut a swathe across all different strata of society and was read by millions. Wolf Totem was given as a Chinese New Year present by People's Liberation Army generals and read out at business seminars.
The bestseller is based on the personal experiences of Jiang Rong, a university professor in Beijing and it paints a very different picture of China from the one usually presented to Western audiences, more used to the "scar literature" describing the ravages of the era of former supreme leader Mao Zedong, and memoirs such as Wild Swans by Jung Chang, or the confessional chick-lit of Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby.
Like many other young Communist intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, Jiang became a Red Guard and he took his ideological fervour to the countryside - in his case to the Gobi in 1967, where he came very close to the packs of wolves which roam the wide grasslands found there.
"I spent 30 years thinking and six years writing Wolf Totem, and my only hope was to produce an appealing story," is how 62-year-old Jiang describes his work.
The story is an appealing one, yet the syntax of 1960s Red Guard fervour jars, as do the often extreme nationalistic sentiments and the obsessive romanticising of the steppes.
However, Wolf Totem works on many levels, as a Bildungsroman of the hero Chen Zhen's growing awareness, but also as a fascinating description of how the cadres of the Cultural Revolution thought.
At times the incidents in the book seem too good to be true, and this is definitely a novel not a biography, but it provides an amazing insight into a mindset that is utterly alien to most Westerners, and indeed many Chinese.
In the late 1960s, Mongolian farmers still led a nomadic lifestyle, roaming the steppes with their sheep and cows, in harmony with nature. They both loved and hated the wolves, which would attack them and their livestock, but were also their objects of worship.
The place where Jiang pitched up had just a few hundred inhabitants in an area of 4,000 square miles and Chen is forced to fight the wolves to protect his life. He sees a group of women and children fighting off a giant wolf trying to steal their sheep. Chen develops a relationship with Little Wolf, a cub he finds in a burrow, an incident Jiang said really happened.
From Little Wolf he learns a lot about the true nature of wolves and he finds spiritual inspiration in Mongolian religious rituals based around the dogs. Jiang returned to Beijing in 1978 but decided to write the book only much later. The author argues that the wolf's tactics were adopted by the armies of the 13th-century Mongol hordes, led by Genghis Khan, who conquered a huge part of Asia and Europe, getting almost as far west as Vienna.
It is a real surprise the book did not fall foul of the Communist Party's censors, as it can be read as a call for greater personal freedom and individual responsibility.
It is also critical of the philosophy of Confucianism - the Communist Party has promoted a return to traditional Confucian values in recent years to fill a spiritual void left by breakneck economic growth.
Wolf Totem will be the first novel out of the publisher Penguin's China venture, which is headed by long-term China resident Jo Lusby.
"It's a very Chinese story and I liked the idea of publishing something that was popular in China. The book is not pandering to people's cliches in terms of the impact on contemporary China," said Lusby.
"I felt it would work because it's an old Mongolian man talking to a young Han Chinese guy, so a lot of explaining goes on quite naturally. It's assuming the core reader knows nothing about culture. It takes the reader by the hand," said Lusby.
"Jiang Rong set out to write a book with many layers. You can read it on a simple level. It's about the need for true freedom, about living according to true nature," she said.
Not everyone is convinced. Wolfgang Kubin, one of Germany's leading literary critics and a top sinologist, says the book is "fascist" and "causes China to lose face".
But it has enthusiastic backers too. In November, it won Asia's first major literary prize, which was launched by Man, the backers of the Booker prize.
Adrienne Clarkson, a Chinese-Canadian and former governor general of Canada, who chaired the judging panel, described it as a "masterly work".
A central idea in the book is that Chinese people have become sheepish in the face of China's "dragon", or imperial and dictatorial culture, and they need to learn to awaken their long-suppressed nature. Lusby believes the book is not a nationalistic screed and its message should have a global appeal.
"The core message is that people should behave more like wolves, rather than sheep. But that's not saying they should take over the world," said Lusby.