Time travel

I was in my teens and a bathtub when I first read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Published in 1969, the novel is about an American prisoner-of-war, Billy Pilgrim, who is held captive in Dresden during the Allied bombing that destroyed the city. This was an experience shared by the author, who in a postmodern flourish meets his own protagonist in the filthy latrines. I opened my mother’s slim 1970s paperback, began to read – ‘All this happened, more or less’ – and kept on reading until I had finished it, by which time the bath was cold and my fingers were as pulpy as the pages. When I re-read the same copy for this review it fell to pieces. So it goes.

Those who have read Madeleine Thien’s bestselling Do Not Say We Have Nothing will recognise The Book of Records as being the title of the manuscript at its heart – a dangerously dissenting history of China. In her latest novel, Thien uses the title to explore the future rather than the past – or so it seems at first. Extensive flooding has caused Lina and her father to leave Foshan and retreat to ‘the Sea’, a labyrinthine ‘nothing place’ where people usually shelter just for a short while before moving on. It resembles Kowloon Walled City, the immense, densely populated structure that, before being demolished, was close to where Thien’s mother grew up.