Book Club - Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Siang Lu is the author of The Whitewash, a tremendous mockumentary style exploration of the movie industry, which won an ABIA for best Audiobook. Siang is also the co-creator of The Beige Index, your definitive guide to how white your movie viewing really.

Siang’s new novel is Ghost Cities.

Xiang is working as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate when it’s discovered he really doesn’t speak much Chinese. This is considered a less than desirable outcome and Xiang is both fired and culturally shamed for his lack of national pride.

If that wasn’t insult enough Xiang soon discovers he is going viral in mainland China as the #BadChinese. Something of a cultural parody of the diaspora population. His digital notoriety sees him drawn into the orbit of the megalomaniacal director/entrepreneur Baby Bao.

Xiang is quickly whisked off to the Ghost City of Port Man Tou, where he is set to star in the city wide production of Baby Bao’s simulation of reality. A movie within a city within a movie that is aiming to create an economy so circular it might just get vertigo.

Siang Lu’s debut The Whitewash set the stage for his flair for cultural observation and a shrewd type of observational humour that honestly reminded me of the late great Terry Pratchett.

Xiang is a kind of everyman who is constantly off-balance in the funhouse mirror world of Baby Bao, who is himself a chimeric beast of modern globalist enterprise.

Now if this isn’t enough Ghost Cities establishes that the whole enterprise of Port Man Tou is a strange echo of a far distant Emperor and his quest to build a city and a dynasty that will carry his legacy into perpetuity.

Ghost Cities is a novel that offers many rewards for both the casual or the committed reader. Lu’s writing is effortlessly clever and glides from misadventure to catastrophe, challenging the reader to root for both Xiang and Baby Bao despite their clearly being at odds (and Baby Bao truly seeming like a monster). This reading easily offers up the kind of blockbuster Baby Bao would love to make.

In the paralleled storylines, the clever mix of language and the intricately woven plotting we can also find a intellectually stimulating read; a kind of arthouse cinema for the soul that equally Baby Bao would also like to make (I mean he has taken over a whole city and is simultaneously filming all its inhabitants to film multiple movies at once).

Ghost Cities is a marvel and beyond all that just tremendously fun to read.

Go check out Ghost Cities from Siang Lu.

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