The pace of change in China during the last 15 years has been extraordinarily fast; the pace at which its literature reaches us in translation, shamefully slow. Chinese dissident writer Ma Jian is known in the English-speaking world for his award-winning travel memoir of rural China in the 1980s, Red Dust.

Since the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong in 1997, he has been living with his partner and translator in London. The Noodle Maker, the first of Jian’s novels to appear in English, is set soon after the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, already ancient history to today’s young entrepreneurs, artists and university students.

Reading The Noodle Maker has some of the blurred effect of a time-lapse photograph — it is a hard-hitting satire of a cultural moment that has come and gone. Only a reviewer intimate with today’s China could judge to what extent its critique is still sharp.

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