The Beijing Spring of 1989: PJ O'Connor, an Irish journalist working in Beijing, falls in love with his language tutor, a young university teacher named Song. Consequently he is drawn into the student demonstrations that are to culminate in the Tiananmen Square massacre. This book takes the form of a novel, but what the author has actually done is to graft an unremarkable little love story onto an accomplished work of journalism. David Rice was in Beijing in the spring of 1989. He later returned to China to conduct hundreds of clandestine interviews with veterans of the student demonstrations. His book synthesises eyewitness accounts, speeches by students and by government leaders, wire service reports, as well as Chinese history and literature and his own experience of the country.
The resulting portrait of the teeming city of Beijing as it was in those epic weeks is utterly fascinating.
Sadly the novel is marred by stock characters and plodding dialogue. The rather doltish PJ's love for his idealised Chinese woman is somehow unwholesome to behold. And yet the last chapters are fast paced and gripping, as the standoff between students and government reaches its awful climax.
Here at last the hitherto dull love story becomes powerfully affecting. Undeniably Rice's commendable documentary work gains lyricism and immediacy by being presented in this commonplace fictional framework.