It was perhaps unhelpful for the novelist Mo Yan’s literary reputation to win the 2012 Nobel prize for literature. He is the first Chinese Nobel laureate who is neither in exile nor in jail, and discussion of his merits defaulted to his relationship with the regime and the vexed question of whether official approval was compatible with literary excellence. His critics argued that his credibility suffered by comparison with others whose opposition was more explicitly embedded in the contest of values and moral claims between liberty and communism, and the Chinese government’s evident delight at the prize did nothing to help.

It is a pity for those who might otherwise enjoy his work that he was put on one side of a line that he himself had not chosen to draw. A reader who brings an open mind to Frog, the novel first published in Chinese in 2009, awarded the Mao Dun literary prize in 2011 and now impeccably translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, will discover a subtle if occasionally baggy text that does not slot easily into a political binary.

Mo Yan, which means “Don’t speak”, is the pen name of Guan Moye, the son of a well-to-do landowning family from Shandong province in northeast China. The novel is set, like much of his work, in his real-life home county of Gaomi. Why the title Frog? The answer is a meandering connection Mo Yan makes between human sperm, early stage embryos, tadpoles and bullfrogs that is woven through a novel concerned primarily with the importance of love and life.

The ostensible subject is the life story of the author’s aunt, known as Gugu, which is told through a series of letters to a celebrated but unidentified Japanese writer, in which the narrator declares his intention to write a play about Gugu. The short play is finally completed and appended to the novel.

Gugu is 70 when the story opens with the first letter. The daughter of a famous doctor, her life spans the Japanese occupation of China, the victory of the Communist party in 1949, the hunger and violent political upheavals of the first 30 years of communist rule and, finally, the lurch to a peculiarly rampant form of state-directed capitalism and the social forces it unleashes. Some villagers grow rich; others sink into destitution.

Gugu trains as a midwife while still a charismatic and heroic teenager, and begins her career by dispatching the ignorant and superstitious old women who, with fatal effects, have hitherto attended village births. Gugu’s reputation spreads quickly as she delivers children through the ravages of famine and political upheaval. (One cohort is known as the “sweet potato” generation for the fact that their appearance marks a return to fertility after the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward.)

Her golden career falters, however, when her glamorous fiancé, an air force pilot, defects to Taiwan. Narrowly escaping disgrace as a conspirator in his treason, Gugu throws herself with renewed and implacable zeal into the state’s “one-child” policy. The beloved midwife becomes hated state abortionist, hunting down and forcibly terminating unlicensed pregnancies. Many expectant mothers and thousands of unborn children die horribly. When China begins its economic transformation, only the poor remain caught in the rules. The rich can afford to pay the fines; the poor have to cheat. The policy stays in place, one character explains, because it allows the state to collect fines.

The cast of village characters faces the absurdities and cruelties inflicted on them by life, the party and each other with a comic fatalism reminiscent of Jaroslav Haoek’s The Good Soldier Svejk. Most are resigned to the unavoidable necessity of obeying orders, however ludicrous and cruel their effects might be, since the consequences of defiance, vividly described in the novel, are extreme.

Mo Yan’s use of magic and fable has inspired comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For his characters the village bestiary of sprites and demons are everyday companions. His villagers are all but immune to ideology, and throughout the one-child policy they continue to believe that, as the philosopher Mencius puts it, the worst form of lack of filial piety is the failure to produce an heir. They are everyman, long-suffering and, on the whole, well disposed towards their fellow human beings. They have no great expectation of happiness, and in that they are generally right.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2014