Bridge of Birds

The children of the village of Ku-fu fall into a coma during the silkworm harvest, and Number Ten Ox, a young man of considerable strength and limited education, is sent to the city with the village's savings to find a sage who can help. What his money buys is Li Kao, an ancient scholar of extraordinary brilliance who introduces himself by admitting to a slight flaw in his character, which turns out to encompass fraud, theft, blackmail and the occasional murder. Together they set out after the Great Root of Power, and their search takes them through the labyrinth of Emperor Wu's tomb, into the household of the Ancestress, past a miser, a bandit, a scholar's ghost and a monstrously rich man's daughter, and finally into a story about the Princess of Birds that has been hiding inside the folk tales all along. Hughart's China never existed and is the better for it. The book is a farce, a fairy tale and a mystery at once, plotted with the precision of a good detective novel, and its final movement is unexpectedly beautiful: everything the comedy has thrown away turns out to have been load-bearing.