ENTERTAINMENT

Dai Wei lay in a coma for 10 years, paralyzed and unable to see or to speak. He had been shot in the head by Chinese government troops during the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

What makes Beijing Coma enthralling, despite its political weightiness, is the way Ma Jian brings his characters – including the silent Dai Wei – to noisy life.

The novel alternates between Dai Wei's present, where he is cared for by his mother, and his past, which is a flood of memories. He remembers his first love, and his second and third. He relives his first encounter with the police, and, bit by bit, the days that led up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Dark humor abounds. As Dai Wei lies in a coma, able to hear his mother complain and prattle on, but unable to speak to her, he muses: "My mother has become used to speaking aloud to me, as I lie here as listless as a hibernating fish." Besides such apt comparisons, the author provides precise descriptions of how things smell, how people dress or wear their hair, so as to bring the reader into the present moment, and to provide comic relief amid passages of extreme seriousness.

It is hard for a reader to keep the students straight, because there are so many of them, and it takes an act of will to remember the unfamiliar Chinese names. Page after page, the students make their plans and change their alliances. They make love, listen to music, go to restaurants, dance, exercise, smoke cigarettes, study, and engage in petty power struggles.

All in all, the plot holds few surprises. Minute by minute, it leads up to the confrontation in the square.

Through Dai Wei's memories of his father and grandfather, the narrative reaches back to the cruelties of earlier times in China. His father, a violinist with the National Opera, was held for 22 years in a work camp during the Cultural Revolution for a minor infraction. The grandfather was buried alive so his land could be redistributed to peasants in the early days of Mao. A neighbor, Granny Li, had scalding water poured over her head by the Red Guards.

Dai Wei's mother, who sang with the opera, reared their two sons, mostly alone. The three of them suffered discrimination because the father had been denounced as a "rightist." Eventually, he was released and rehabilitated – only to die of stomach cancer.

Toward the end, this long novel becomes almost Dickensian in its exaggeration.

There is much that is grim in the book, but also much that is not. The spirit of the students and their youthful loves and enthusiasms give it energy. So does the mother's relentless pursuit of healers in hopes of waking her son. She sells his urine to those who think drinking it will heal them; she sells his kidney to provide money for his care.

Throughout the novel, Mr. Ma drops hints that, like Dai Wei, the people of China are in a coma they need to wake from. As one student leader proclaims, "Let us use our idealism to wake the Chinese people from their slumber!" Mr. Ma leaves the impression that though China has changed since the massacre, it has not changed enough.

The author lives in London with his wife, Flora Drew, also his translator. He can travel to China, but his books are banned there.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.

Ma Jian

Translated from the Chinese

by Flora Drew

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27)