The Great Leap Forward

Imagine that Kafka, Borges and Wittgenstein, after binging on Fu Manchu novels and the Illuminatus trilogy, all sat down to write a spy thriller, with a little help from Lewis Carroll. Set the novel in China in 1978—an isolated empire of conspiracy, deception and delusion—and tune in to Radio Beijing for the astonishing announcement: China will unilaterally disarm. Is this a Great Leap Forward for mankind—or a plot to take over the world?

Into this surreal landscape, this garden of forking paths, steps Number Five, a master spy of undisclosed nationality. What he finds in China is so shocking, so strange, so far beyond the usual categories of fact or fiction, that he returns a changed man, and the story of his mission must be passed off as fantasy for thirty-five years.

Chairman (now called Chairperson) Mao has passed on, leaving the nation torn between the Gang of Four and the shadowy Red Lotus Clique—and buzzing with rumors of a secret weapon to be unveiled when the disarmament is complete.
Five has two weeks to save the West from annihilation. He finds himself stumbling into a shadow show of Foreign Devils, Puppet Emperors, Eunuchs, Revisionist Bandits and Running Dogs of the Imperialists. With help from the beautiful Wild Thing, he gropes his way toward the truth; but first he must face down the dreaded Chinese Olympic ping pong team and the mysterious Doctor who may be the mastermind of all this anarchy.
Die-hard fans of thrillers and spy novels beware: Don’t buy this book unless you’re prepared to suspend your expectations in favor of a story that’s funny, literary and trans-genre’d. On one level this is a spy novel, on another a literary and political satire, on another a philosophical investigation into the limits of knowledge and personal identity. Espionage (as John Le Carré taught us) is about deception, disguise, and the attempt to wrestle knowledge from ambiguous and deceptive appearances.

Does Five ever find the truth? The history of China in the past 25 years proves that given enough time, the surreal becomes the real. Who in 1978 could have foreseen that the Chinese Communist Party would become the world’s leading exponent of capitalism? Who could have predicted an opera about Richard Nixon?

Fans of the Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer, the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (particularly The Garden of Forking Paths), the film The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolocci, and Theravada Buddhism (particularly the Milinda Panha or 100 Questions of King Menander to Nagasena) might find a special interest in this novel.