PHILIP Larkin once commented that he had no objection to visiting China as long as he could come home again the same day. He should have had a word with Tom, the central character of Sid Smith's third novel, China Dreams, who only needs to close his eyes to arrive in the "middle kingdom", although the place he "visits" is a mythological, grotesquely sexualised dreamland. "I'm in China more than I'm here," he thinks, when threatened by reality once more. Smith's previous two novels, Something About A House and A House By The River, were actually set in period China, and both contained passages of ugly if inventive violence. Set free from a physical landscape, his vision is even stronger. A young man barely out of his teens, Tom begins to dream luridly when he starts work as a delivery boy at a Chinese takeaway. At first, everything is hunky-dory. He enjoys his job and a relationship with the owner's pretty daughter, May Tan.
Alas, it cannot last and Tom is forced to return to the squat he shares with ex-cons who have a regrettable sense of hygiene. His own aversion to soap may have lost him both job and girlfriend: "Grease keeps you warm."
Another factor might be his chronic smoking of marijuana. Puffing on joints like they're Woodbines is not a good idea when there is a history of mental illness in the family. His sister has an unnamed disability; his father departed from reality while running a religious cult.
Mr Tan's decision may also have had something to do with the suicide of May's twin, Johnny, who dies by stabbing himself in the groin with scissors. It's hinted that Johnny, who was gay, may have had an experimental sexual dalliance with Tom in the past.
The dreams, which pounce frequently and without warning, grow ever more sexual and violent. May appears to him as a bandit queen; Johnny as a hermaphrodite prostitute. Tom suspects that Johnny's troubled spirit is responsible for his disturbed sleep, and grows ever more tramp-like as he stalks May and her family.
The distinction between reality and dream fades until Tom's "China" is little more than a dreamscape upon which id and superego rampage unchecked. As the book counts down towards its fatal denouement, a strong stomach is necessary: "She sat cross-legged in the Underworld, sitting on bones and chewing bones and pleasuring herself with a leg-bone, the hair over her face."
China Dreams is a book that's hard to love but relishable in one respect: one so rarely comes across a novel that in following a fever dream to its gaudy conclusion makes little concession to the trembling reader's sensitivities. China Nightmares, more like.
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