To begin a novel with a character who is dead from the very first page is a risk. It is not enough for the writer to envisage an idiosyncratic afterlife from which the central character remotely observes with fondness and frustration the fortunes of those still living. To work as a compelling story, the character must have ongoing dilemmas and concerns that resound with the reader's own understanding, as does Alice Sebold's Susie Salmon. The Lovely Bones took the world by storm, answering an apparent need for a book about eternity and revenge.
Comparisons may be drawn with Yu Hua's sixth novel, The Seventh Day, a subversive gothic allegory on modern China. Central character 41-year-old Yang Fei is certainly dead and so are the identities he meets on his seven-day odyssey. All the souls with whom he comes into contact have been adversely affected by the insane growth, burdened bureaucracy, corruption and environmental ruin that is modern-day China. At a feast in the Land of the Unburied, Yang meets the proprietor of the restaurant in which he had met his fiery end. Yang asks him, "If you have a grave, you have a resting place, and if you don't have a grave, you gain eternal life - which do you think is better?"
The proprietor doesn't know the answer to this, and neither does Yang Fei. It is the central philosophical question of the novel, one with obvious metaphorical application to life under the current regime.
Each of the Unburied tells his or her story and most are tragic, though shot through with resistance and wry humour. Interwoven with their stories of their lives and deaths are Yang Fei's own memories of his childhood, ill-fated marriage and struggle against penury.
There are repeated descriptions and phrases, just as there are in fairy stories, and startling images deep with metaphor and meaning. For example, 27 late-term aborted foetuses, regarded in the living world as medical refuse, lie on individual leaves in a tree. Each time we see them, Yu reminds us how they sing like nightingales. In Yu's vision of the afterlife bills are paid by the seller mentioning the price and the buyer agreeing to it; the imagined food is delicious and diametrically opposite to the living's tainted and fake foods (milk powder gets a mention). Skeletons smile by opening their mouths, since they no longer have the muscles and flesh to do it in any other way.
