Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie, translated by Adriana Hunter

224pp, Chatto & Windus,  5. £12.99 

Dai Sijie is a wonderful storyteller. There are not many storytellers writing at present in the French language, which makes his speed and intricacy and drama appear even more surprising. Once on a Moonless Night is full of tales within tales and worlds within worlds, ranging from ancient Chinese empires through communist China to modern Beijing. The female narrator is French, studying Chinese. She becomes involved in the search for a lost sacred text, on a roll of silk, in a lost language.

The silk has been torn in two by the teeth of a maddened emperor, Puyi, as he flies on his only aeroplane journey to become the Japanese puppet emperor of Manchuria in 1931. Half of it floats to earth. It contains one of those endless tales of a traveller on a dark ledge coming to the end of a track, when jumping into the void is the only possibility. The final section is missing.

The lost language is Tumchooq, related to Sanskrit. The word means "bird beak", and describes the shape of the tiny kingdom where it originated, buried by a sandstorm in AD817. The narrator discovers a French scholar, Paul d'Ampère, author of Notes on Marco Polo's Book of the Wonders of the World, who deciphered Tumchooq, and took Chinese nationality to be able to pursue his work. She also discovers a young vegetable seller, with red hairs among the black, whose name is Tumchooq, with whom she falls in love. Tumchooq - a resourceful and stoical person - turns out to be the son of Paul d'Ampère, who is now in a remote communist prison camp in the mountains, working in a gem mine in appalling conditions. Each time the son visits, the father teaches him a few words more of Tumchooq. The father also converses with a disgraced scholar in Tumchooq, playing a kind of imaginary linguistic chess.

Everything in all these interwoven tales is extreme, from intellectual obsession to the cruelty of empresses, from the mountain landscapes to cabbages. The tale opens with the narrator doing her first paid translation work, on the film of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. She is beset by hundreds of small Chinese children, all carrying violin cases, who have come from the remotest parts of China to see Yehudi Menuhin. He is there for one day, choosing a musical scholar to take to the west. When she meets Tumchooq he teaches her to love raw vegetables - Sijie writes wonderful descriptions of shapes and textures and tastes. But the vagaries of Chinese planned agriculture mean that there can be a dearth of cabbages for weeks, and then the street will be rolling with a plethora of them, which have to be left to rot. There is always a sense of the pressure of numbers of people and things, which seems to provoke in the characters a ferocious determination to be individuals, to make their own fates, single-mindedly.

Places and events are shocking. There is a scene in which Tumchooq and his friend Ma, as boys, get lost in the Forbidden City. (Tumchooq's mother works in the Imperial Archives, a communist-constructed building on the edge of the city.) They find themselves in the Exhibition of Ancient Chinese Punishments and Tortures, which are described with precision and gusto - a sculpture of a man being torn apart by galloping horses, a photograph of a decapitation with the cigarette dropping from the mouth of the severed head. Ma reveals facts about Tumchooq's parentage, and its relation to the mysterious scroll. Tumchooq loses his temper and leaves his friend in a torture machine that strangles extremely slowly, taking several days.

These things can be compared to the lively detail of the prison camp near Ya'an, in the mountains near Tibet, where between 1959 and 1961 a million people - 40% of the local population - died of famine. The mine shafts - fetid and suffocating, reached down long bamboo ladders inside small holes - are sharply and horribly imagined, as are the guards, the appalling cold, the windstorms, the disgusting food. What is odd is that although these things are dreadful, the pace with which they are told gives them the energy of distance and legend.

There are several different kinds of texts within the story - diaries by the narrator and Tumchooq, reports of interrogations of Puyi, quoted sections of the biography of the empress Cixi - but they all have a quality that I think is part of Sijie's natural way of writing. They are so well done, in such a swift and uncompromising way, that the reader feels a readerly excitement, even pleasure, as he or she is swept along from disaster to disaster. It may be that reader and author and characters feel the simple astonishment of having survived, of still being alive.

The end of the characters' tales is brought about by their single-minded obsessiveness, and is both baffling and inevitable, perhaps. We are given the lost ending of the tale on the scroll which began with the traveller on a dark and moonless night. Unlike the end of the novel, the end of the tale is beautifully conclusive and satisfactory.