Fancy a fictional train-ride with the best of Europe's philosophers?

Telegraph

02-05-2025

The Book of Records is a hard novel to pin down. The title draws on a motif from Madeleine Thien's last novel, the Booker Prize-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about the far-reaching effects of the Cultural Revolution on a group of musicians who met at the Shanghai Conservatory.
One of the new book's subjects is the complexity of historical memory. Complex in various ways: since every story is an attempt to impose a version of the truth, historical memory and the ways it can be manipulated become instruments of state control. But memory is also one of the last defenses of the powerless, even if it leads to its own problems: 'Could a person and the memory of that person diverge so far that recollection itself became a kind of betrayal?'
The novel begins with a middle-aged woman remembering some of the defining events of her childhood: namely, arriving with her father at a refugee camp, known a little confusingly as the Sea. Lina is seven years old and doesn't understand why they've left their hometown of Foshan, in China, or why they've become separated from her mother and brother, and we're as much in the dark as she.
Narrative confusion, though, offers an expansion of possibilities – time and space function in unpredictable ways. Windows and doors open unexpectedly onto different views and realities, depending on the people who are in them or their moods. As Lina's father, Wui Shin, explains to her, 'the buildings of the Sea are made of time.' Ships arrive periodically to carry the refugees away, but the body of water they appear on changes from day to day. Sometimes it's the Atlantic, sometimes it's the Atrai River or the South China Sea… Part of the point is to turn the Sea into a symbol of refugee camps all over the world, across all times, but also to suggest the way that each of those camps is in itself a shifting, temporary ground where different cultures briefly, glancingly, come together before moving on.
When they fled Foshan, Lina's father took with him three books from her childhood home, instalments from an educational series on The Great Lives of Voyagers. He picked them because they looked like they hadn't been read: 'Number 3 was about Du Fu, the poet. Number 70 was Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher. Number 84 was Hannah Arendt, a writer.' The plot, such as it is, begins to take shape when Lina opens a previously unseen door in her apartment block and enters into a world of mysterious neighbours – two men and a woman who turn out to be, in ways the novel never quite specifies, vague incarnations of the subjects of her three books. Meanwhile, the neighbours tell stories, about Du Fu, about Spinoza, about Arendt, separated by centuries and oceans but held together by a common search for meaning – a kind of forced migration in itself, toward truth but away from home.
Thien doesn't make her job easy. She has to keep creating narrative momentum from scratch, and it's a testament to her skills as a writer that she manages so often. One of the highlights of the novel is Arendt's escape from occupied France, through which Thien guides us with great patience and dramatic skill.
But even here she sometimes lets the ideas take over from the more intimate weight of the personal stories. On her train ride into Lisbon, Arendt gets into a philosophical debate with the strangers in her cabin. One of them cites Descartes: 'Tell me this… If the outside world is erased from all five senses, what is time?' It's a conversation that makes sense in a novel that functions at the crossroads of fantasy, history and philosophy, but those games come at a price: the moment doesn't feel very real.
As I said: a hard novel to pin down or sum up. Thien writes brilliantly about Wui Shin's history, and the reason why he fled Foshan with his daughter. He's a systems engineer who had, almost unwittingly, become a state informer: 'He'd had no moral centre because he had taken it as a matter of fact that he could not be corrupted.' Eventually he even informs on his wife, not because he wants to but because he thinks it would look more suspicious if he doesn't say anything: systems involve you in their own logic, whether you believe in them or not.
And yet the story of his life with Lina never quite takes off and remains a framing device – the fantasy element is a kind of puncture in reality through which narrative pressure leaks away. Of course, the novel is self-aware enough to know that. As Lina's father warns her at the beginning: 'you'll never be content if you can't separate what you want from what really is.'