Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

They’re definitely out there if you look hard enough. Amidst the mountains of commercial crap there are still literary gems to be found, and for me, Tash Aw’s ‘Five Star Billionaire’, is definitely one of them. It would seem another master story-teller has arrived on the scene with a highly compelling style of prose to match his absorbing narrative. I wanted the thing to go on and on, and when it did reach its bitter-sweet conclusion I immediately yearned for a sequel. If Mantel can conjure up an award winning trilogy, I’m damn certain that Tash Aw can do the same. In the meantime I think I’ll dig out his two previous novels in the hope of getting myself on a similar literary high.

There are five main characters in the novel and we are treated to an intimate view of their dreams and thwarted aspirations, not to mention their little self-deceptions that we all engage in at one time or another. And then there is the clever interconnection of these central characters, an interconnection that TA pulls off with creditable conviction. In addition to these superbly convincing characters, there is a sixth and central protagonist whose influence on the novel is felt everywhere and always. I refer to the city of Shanghai, the world’s largest and fastest growing city, the city which provides the omniscient central setting to the story. And whereas the five main characters come across as recognisably universal, complete as they are with all their complex human frailties, Shanghai stands out as rather unique. And it is to Shanghai that I wish now to turn my attention.

I’ve visited Shanghai just once and that was for a mere 24 hour stop-over. But in that tiny window I was able to grasp the phenomenal juxtaposition between the old and the new. Surrounding the state-of-the-art Shanghai infrastructure developments were dead chickens hanging up to dry ready for street consumption. That was some ten years ago but reading Tash Aw’s novel, it seems that anomalous situation still exists. And ten years ago I got the distinct impression that capitalism was alive and well in Shanghai, complete with its winners and losers, and that is precisely the message that comes out, loud and clear, from ‘Five Star Billionaire’. It is still perhaps too early to say if China has irreversibly surrendered its communist direction, but there is little doubt that both the dynamic and destructive forces of capitalism have been unleashed in China and nowhere more so than in Shanghai. Tash Aw draws this out mercilessly. Can a centrally Communist Party, however ubiquitous that Party seeks to be, control and harness those forces remains to be seen, and Tash Aw’s novel is a wonderful testament to that unresolved question.

By creating real-life characters that are living through Shanghai’s seemingly unstoppable madness, Tash Aw has given us a valuable insight into this most bizarre of historical transitions; a communist party seeking to utilise and control the dynamics of capitalism. I suppose we could look to Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920’s as a precedent, but somehow China’s experience today, and Shanghai in particular, seems wholly unique. Then again, there is the gangster capitalism of the former Soviet Union which is not a million miles away from present day China. And if the Chinese bloggers are right, most of the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party are already multi-millionaires. Not so different from the Russian oligarchs swanning around the planet with their private yachts and private jets and their dirty dosh squirreled away in off-shore tax havens.

All the characters in Tash Aw’s story are both winners and losers, and in a theme that is truly universal, Tash Aw shows that the line between success and failure is both delicate and blurred. If socialism should see a closing of the gap between the haves and the have-nots, capitalism can be reliably expected to produce mind-numbing extremes, and that is precisely what we see in Five Star Billionaire, that, and the inevitable rise of corporate criminality and state corruption. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party is a part of that criminality just adds to the messy complexity of Shanghai life. It’s all there in Tash Aw’s book and it makes for fascinating reading.

I’ve been flicking through my notes looking for the perfect quote to end on, something that captures the universal and the particular of Tash Aw’s wonderful novel. Finally I’ve settles on a lengthy passage that seeks to sum up what Shanghai is today, a meeting place of the old and the new, of tradition and modernity, of endless possibilities and dreams and then the inevitable clash with reality. This is how Tash Aw puts it:

Yinghui recognised a restlessness in the banker’s face, a mixture of excitement and apprehension that people exhibited when still new in Shanghai, in search of something, even though they could not articulate what that something was maybe it was money, or status, or. God forbid, even love but whatever it was, Shanghai was not about to give it to them. The city held its promises just out of reach, waiting to see how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted, how long you were prepared to wait. And until you adjusted your expectations to take account of that, you would always be on the edge, for despite the restaurants and shops and art galleries and the feeling of unbridled potential, Shanghai would always seem to be accelerating a couple of steps ahead of you, no matter how hard you worked or played. The crows, the traffic, the impenetrable dialect, the muddy rains that carried the remnants of the Gobi desert sandstorms and stained your clothes every March: the city was teasing you, testing your limits, using you. You arrived thinking you were going to use Shanghai to get what you wanted, and it would take time before you realised it was using you; that it had already moved on, and you were playing catch-up.’ P296/297

Yes, in some ways it could be about any big metropolis, but there is enough there to make it specifically and uniquely Shanghai. I think that Tash AW has done for Shanghai what John Lancaster has done for London in his recently published Capital. Two great novels that help define the early 21st century. And like Lancaster, Tash Aw has done so with subtlety and craft. Highly recommended.

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