Telling Tales

The last story in Ha Jin's collection of twelve short stories The Bridegroom was one of the strongest in the volume. After Cowboy Chicken Came To Town exemplified a number of the virtues of the work as a whole, not least the poignant combination of sly humour interlaced with a deep sense of a lack of fulfilment for the generally baffled characters Ha Jin creates. The deliberate lack of any real depth of characterisation works particularly well in this tale: the reader senses there's more to the characters than the narrative allows us to encounter. The hints of a greater complexity that we cannot access emphasise the writer's acute awareness of the limitations on humanity imposed by the political system so forensically analysed in these pages.

The feeling of the sheer pettiness of the society centred on Muji never lets up. It reminded me of Joyce's Dubliners in some respects. Only the trivial has some kind of real meaning in this half-paralysed world, seeking re-birth through a kind of compromised, only half-understood capitalism.

But putting it like that doesn't do justice to the particularities that Ha Jin brings alive for us. When the burning and soiling of surplus chicken annoys as it much as it does here, you know you're in the hands of a master story-teller.