Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing won basically every Canadian prize going in 2016 and made the Booker shortlist. It’s about three generations of Chinese musicians getting ground up by land reform, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen. It’s fine. I think the reasons it’s only fine are more interesting than the book itself.

I.

Thien has clearly noticed that her subject is full of contradictions: people who loved the revolution and were destroyed by it, music that is both a private refuge and evidence against you. Good instinct. Then she applies it to every sentence. The music is loud and quiet. It’s sad and joyful. The sun is shining but cold. Somewhere there must be a workshop rule that every image should contain its own negation, and nobody told her the rule has diminishing returns. Two characters kill themselves in this book. By the end I understood them.

II.

The bigger problem is that nobody is the bad guy. Everyone is a victim. Sparrow is a victim, Zhuli is a victim, Kai is a victim, their parents are victims, and the generation before them were victims of the Japanese, the British and the civil war. But the Cultural Revolution wasn’t done to China by aliens. Somebody wrote the denunciations and somebody held the belts, and a lot of those somebodies got denounced themselves a year later.

The novel never goes inside one of those heads. The character I wanted was someone like Xi Jinping: father purged, sent down to live in a cave in Shaanxi as a teenager, applies to join the Party something like ten times, gets rejected, keeps applying, and ends up redder than red. That’s the real puzzle of the era, why suffering under the system so often made people more loyal to it, and a novel where everyone is a victim can’t write that person.

The flip side is Sparrow. He spends most of the book fragile, making his choices out of fear, and then near the end he turns into a hero, apparently because love does that. But the people who actually survived those decades mostly did it through small cowardices and compromises. That’s the interesting story, and the book flinches from it by redeeming its cowards at the last minute.

The same blind spot points outward. China in this book is only ever on the receiving end. Vietnam doesn’t appear at all, which is a bit rich from where I’m sitting, since China invaded us in 1979, well inside the novel’s timeline. And it’s not as if the characters are far away. A big chunk of the book happens in Guangdong, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, right next door. By 1989 Hong Kong was holding tens of thousands of Vietnamese boat people in camps, and southern China had taken in a couple of hundred thousand ethnic Chinese expelled from Vietnam. You’d have to work quite hard to live there in those years and never once think about Vietnam.

III.

My cynical theory is that the book was optimised for a Western reader in 2016, and you can see the optimisation everywhere. There are no footnotes, so the background gets delivered by characters explaining their own history to each other. The nicknames are translated so you can keep track (Sparrow, Big Mother Knife, Swirl, Wen the Dreamer), so you get people in 1960s Shanghai speaking immaculate MFA prose under names from a children’s cartoon. Their sensibilities, queer subplots included, feel closer to a Vancouver book club than to Beijing in 1989. The ten-year-old has opinions about grief that most forty-year-olds don’t.

Compare Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, which keeps the names Chinese, leaves the jokes in Chinese, and assumes you’ll cope.

To be fair, one thing Western reviewers complained about is something I think the book gets right. They found the family web hard to follow, and couldn’t see why everyone is so attached to cousins, aunts and great-aunts. Speaking as a Vietnamese reader who is close to my own cousins and aunts, that part is completely believable.

IV.

Nobody in this book has a real job. Everyone is a composer, a violinist, a writer, a copyist of a mysterious novel. Nobody is an engineer or a soldier or a factory cadre, which is strange for a country that spent those decades doing almost nothing but engineering, soldiering and factory work. Even the narrator in present-day Vancouver is an academic mathematician, which is to say a government-funded intellectual. Then you read the author bio, a list of grants and residencies plus a partner who is also a novelist, and it starts to make sense.

As someone who likes maths, I found the maths parts the hardest to take. It’s the kind of maths that exists to be a metaphor: numbers as music, patterns as fate, nothing you could actually check. Compare David Foster Wallace, who really did love the subject and wrote a whole book about infinity. When he writes about maths you can trust it, and it ends up more beautiful precisely because it’s real.

There is also, as far as I can remember, no sex in the entire novel. I don’t need any, but it’s a strange omission in a book whose whole theme is a regime squeezing the life out of people. There were a billion of them. Somebody was having sex.

V.

I suspect this is also why the book came and went. It arrived alongside The Sympathizer at the peak of a particular moment in prize culture, and nearly every review of it is ten years old. A book built to please one year’s jury ages with that year.

If you want this kind of novel done well, read Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, about ordinary people under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. It’s just as researched and just as grim, but the research stays out of the way, and you believe every choice the characters make.