[In the following review, Burckhardt examines Gao's experimental use of narrative voice in Soul Mountain.]

Lingshan (soul-mountain) is a quasi-mythological place “where wonderful things can be seen, where suffering and pain can be forgotten, and where one can find freedom.” There are many Lingshans in China but “soul-mountain” is also a Buddhist name for heaven.

Begun in 1982 when Gao returned to Beijing after a fifteen-thousand-kilometre journey through central and eastern China over a period of five months, Soul Mountain was finished in 1989 in Paris, where Gao currently lives. In its eighty-one short chapters, the novel alternates between an inner and outer journey. What begins as a search for the elusive mountain soon turns into an odyssey in the true sense of the word; a series of wanderings; a long adventurous journey where each episode creates a rhythmic unit of tension and counterpoise that gives the whole work a sense of unity.

Soul Mountain weaves together an intricate pattern of impressions, observations and dialogues. The critic of chapter 72 complains that the work isn't a novel and snarls, “You've slapped together travel notes, moralistic ramblings, feelings, notes, jottings, untheoretical discussions, unfable-like fables, copied out some folk songs, added some legend-like nonsense of your own invention, and are calling it fiction!”—but what the critic cannot fathom is the lack of a named protagonist and that the I, you, she and he of the book are characters.

As in many of his plays, Gao Xingjian creates a light, almost ethereal atmosphere in the novel by alternating between first- and second-person pronouns. In an essay on modern Chinese and literary writing he is careful to note that “if the narrator is truly aware of what he writes, he will realise that the changing of pronouns does not constitute a simple and skilful play of style. The three characters, I, you and he, constitute three distinctive angles of narration that procure a stable psychological base.”

In her translation of Gao's Chinese, Mabel Lee has admirably succeeded in transposing the distinctive voice in which Soul Mountain is written. Gao's is a language where simplicity is refined to a crystalline quality. It is the total lack of artificiality or intellectual mind-games that makes Soul Mountain the kind of book that probes the human soul without any attempt to glorify or vilify. Reality and imagination are transposed into a flow of words which the reader can convincingly relate to and trust from the outset.

There are few modern novels that explore new forms of narration without alienating the reader to some extent or demanding various degrees of effort and skill in reading. The lyric quality of Soul Mountain removes such obstacles to understanding by taking a direct approach. There is no hidden meaning or an all-seeing agent to govern our perception. Rather, we are drawn into an individual's search for meaning, an individual who realises that there may be no meaning, that he means nothing, who chooses to write a book on the human self, who realises that the gods and demons summoned are summoned from within one's own self.

The “she” invoked by “he” so that the loneliness might be alleviated by telling tales which invoke more gods and demons; the patter of children's bare feet on cobbled lanes that echo his childhood; the tales of Daoist recluses, Buddhist nuns and shamans that interweave through the novel; the description of some of China's most inaccessible mountain forests and remote villages—all these elements form a kaleidoscope of images and thoughts that is constantly being shifted and realigned. Soul Mountain offers the reader a momentary and partial view of a transient existence seen through the eyes of a painter with a keen sense of observation who relentlessly questions himself, knowing that even while pretending to understand, he doesn't understand.