"Wolf Totem" is a prizewinner — but it's still kind of a dog

"Wolf Totem"

by Jiang Rong, translated by Howard Goldblatt

Penguin Press, 527 pp., $26.95

Jiang Rong's award-winning novel, "Wolf Totem," sends up a number of red flags. To begin with, it won the 2007 inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize. Does that immediately qualify it as a must read? Marketing publicity notes that it is the "second most read book in China after Mao's little red book." In fact, this appears to be a nonfiction book in wolf's clothing.

Regardless of its genre, it certainly sets off all the requisite bells and whistles. Rong is a pen name of a retired Beijing university professor. He uses the pseudonym because of "his story's inherent criticisms of the Chinese government." The book is reportedly based on the writer's experiences when he lived in nomadic communities in Inner and Outer Mongolia for 11 years.

That's all well and good, but that may also be where the problems start. How does Rong's shepherding on the steppes during the 1960s contribute to the characterization of his alter ego, Chen Zhen? The book is redundant with detail after detail of the herdsmen of the Olonbulang's dependency on wolves. There are vivid descriptions of wolves killing horses, gazelles, sheep, marmots, rabbits, dogs, squirrels, foxes and other animals.

Subsequently, there are gory details of numerous wolf hunts. Fine if the reader is looking for graphic images, but they do little to develop Zhen's characterization or that of any other people in the work. Against everyone's advice, Zhen naively attempts to raise a wolf cub "as a scientific experiment." The results of that should be obvious even to the most inattentive of readers. Why isn't it clear to Zhen?

As for any semblance of story line or plot — that, too, is significantly absent. Little happens in the more than 500 pages that isn't an action sequence. The lengthy descriptions of wolf hunts are interrupted by monotonous discussions of the methods of those hunts. Dialogue is turgid. Any semblance of personal conflicts (between Zhen, Chinese government officials and the grasslanders) is numbingly repetitious.

All of this is supposed to add up to a condemnation of state policy that pits the balance of nature against the need for humans to work together with animals. The destruction of the wolves leads to a significant change in the environment, but that point is made early in the book. Over and over the reader is told that "everything is linked."

Readers with a penchant for Chinese history or for wolf cultures may find "Wolf Totem" enlightening. But that material might have been better served in a documentary or as a nonfiction examination of the same subject. For most readers, the novel, awards aside, may prove to be an overlong, lumbering challenge.