Man's Fate

"Malraux was fairly young in his writing career when he wrote this. He had spent some time in French Indochina, where he had got into a bit of trouble with the French authorities in Vietnam for tomb-raiding. He was also in a leftist phase of his life at that time. Man’s Fate is about the suppression of the labour movement and the nascent Communist Party of China on April 12th, 1927, a massacre which at that time was on the front-page of every newspaper in the world. Left-wing strikes called across Shanghai were bloodily put down by the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in league with local Shanghai gangsters. At least a thousand workers were killed, and some say it goes as high as three or even five thousand. People were literally shot and beheaded in the streets. Malraux tells us this story through the eyes of different Shanghai characters: Chinese that were involved in the revolution, as well as foreigners, French businessmen, women of slightly dubious occupation, and various others, including advice coming from the young Soviet Union to China. “Malraux is showing us that the events of 1927, the revolution, the rise of the Communist Party, the labour movement, the trade unions, are all part of Shanghai’s modernity” It’s an incredible novel, and has one of the best opening scenes of any novel I can think of. An assassin is waiting to strike his target by lying on the canopy above his bed listening to the man sleep, thinking about how he’s going to fall through and plunge his knife into this man. But, at the same time, it’s a novel of the modern Shanghai of the 1920s, so he’s listening and outside he can hear car horns and a traffic jam; he can hear the un-greased wheels of a trolley bus; he can hear a phonograph record playing somewhere; he can see streetlights coming in through the windows. So, we know that we are in 1927 and in the middle of a revolution in China, but we are in an incredibly modern city as well. Malraux is showing us that the events of 1927, the revolution, the rise of the Communist Party, the labour movement, the trade unions, are all part of Shanghai’s modernity. The politics are quite positive in that it reflects, like most Communist Parties in the world did, that communism is an outgrowth of the trade union movement—of the desire to have the eight-hour workday, weekends off and better health and safety. Shanghai had terrible cotton and silk factories which employed many children. The conditions were terrible, the wages were terrible. So there were genuine grievances among this nascent industrial proletariat in Shanghai. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The Chinese Communist Party was very young; it was finding its feet, although some of the characters that were to be big players later—not Mao necessarily, but certainly Zhou Enlai—were very involved. Of course, the foreign authorities, the gangsters and the Kuomintang, all saw this as an attempt to make revolution. Already there was a split between left and right in China, and the Russians were involved in stoking it all up as well. In that sense, it does give you a picture of the Communist Party at a time when it was involved in very necessary things—in traditional socialist disputes rather than just nationalism and top-down control. It was a very different sort of politics, and it’s about the real roots of the Communist Party in China, when they were a long way from taking power. It’s also about how one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, which is very current. Every time I reread the novel, I take a different angle from it. There are brilliant descriptions of the city, that are mostly accurate. There is really good characterisation and plotting. He does go off on a few tangents, some philosophical musings that feel a little dated now that we’re past a lot of existentialism. But generally, I think the book holds up. It’s also an incredible representation of Shanghai—pretty much spot on. It really captures the city at that time. But it was written in 1933, after Malraux had only been in Shanghai, as far as we know, at most for three days in 1932 or thereabouts (later in his career, he dissembled widely about how long and when he had been in Shanghai). So the idea that you need to spend twenty years in China to write a novel about Shanghai is complete nonsense. Malraux writes the best novel about Shanghai, its characters and history, its flavours and sounds, and gets it all after three days!"