[In the following excerpt, Mantel praises Behind the Wall for its ability to portray Chinese society in a manner that makes sense to readers.]

Colin Thubron is a gifted and accomplished travel writer, whose book Among the Russians has been described as one of the best travel books written this century. To him the opening-up of China was ‘like discovering a new room in a house in which you'd lived all your life.’ He is a perceptive and honest traveller [in Behind the Wall,] aware of the burden of his own expectations, his head prone to fill with ‘savage and condescending notions’: at first it seemed that the Chinese he met were engaged in a conspiracy to fulfil every Western cliche about themselves. At an early stage, he feels intense frustration: ‘At every moment, around every corner, the question Who are they? erupts and nags.’ There is a feeling that real life is being conducted just out of his range of vision; and in the cities of China this is literally true, as the earth beneath is ‘perforated like a rotten cheese’ with a network of nuclear shelters, and in Beijing there are restaurants, libraries, hotels, hospitals, all under the ground.

He travelled, too, in a realm of ghosts, the millions who died in the incomprehensible national madness of the Cultural Revolution, which was also a realm of survivors, working and living alongside their former persecutors. What kind of people are these? ‘In one province alone seventy-five different methods of torture were instituted …’ It is the capacity for collective action, collective delusion, that disturbs him so much. In the Fifties, it was decided that the whole population must turn out to destroy the birds, which were eating too much grain. For twenty-four hours the Chinese stood in the fields, beating tin cans and blowing whistles, so that the birds, unable to alight, died of heart failure and dropped from the sky. But the old men keep singing birds in cages, and take them to the public gardens every day. The non-human world is acceptable when tamed and enslaved.

He finds the same phenomenon at the resort of Beidaihe, where the party elite take their summer vacations; the coast is ringed with safety nets, but no one can tell him why the bathers need protection. A landscape or archaeological site becomes real only when the camera comes out, only when a human presence is recorded—preferably one's own. ‘“You're travelling alone?” I was asked. “Then how do you manage to photograph?”’

Gradually the individuals separate themselves from the mass. Perhaps one of his most telling encounters—with a female student of economics, and a young man who wanted to practise his English—took place on a train. Here he performs the traveller's task of reflecting back the people he encounters to themselves: here are the impossible questions, the impossible demands. ‘I don't think I'm beautiful … am I?’ The girl's aspirations tumble out of her, savagely contradictory: ‘I hope I will use my life to serve the people and my motherland … I want to be a millionairess.’ Her face, with its minimal features, could have been sketched by an artist to portray anyone, the average Chinese. Meanwhile the young man interrupts them: ‘Excuse me, Sir, how much do the peasants get to eat in England? Excuse me, Sir, is England a gentleman's country?’

Instead of the ‘worker ants’ of his imagination, and the iron rice bowl society of the recent past, Colin Thubron finds a desolate workless population, seduced by consumerism, apolitical, believing nothing, trusting no one; but with the same veneration for office, the same ancient smugness of great men; in no way egalitarian, ‘emerging from the nightmare idealism of Mao into a more pragmatic and disillusioned world.’ He cannot find the spirits and demons of old China, but he is assured that they survive, staunch reactionaries, in remote villages. The present is as strange as any of the antics of those strangling gods who once lay in wait for travellers, and this is a book of immense interest, beautifully written, Colin Thubron, finely accumulating detail, tolerating and absorbing tensions and contradictions, makes sense of reality for his readers in a way that often only poets can. We remember the grove outside Qufu with the tomb of Confucius—an incense burner without, and cigarette butts within.