Book review: The Last Quarter of the Moon, by Chi Zijian

The Last Quarter of the Moon

by Chi Zijian

(translated by Bruce Humes)

Harvill Secker

Alone, save for her simple-minded grandson, the 90-year-old widow of one of the last chieftains of the Evenki reindeer herders contemplates her life, and the dying ways of her people.

Recounting the long years of her childhood and adult life as one of the nomadic reindeer herders of Inner Mongolia, the unnamed woman paints a vivid picture of the beauty and suffering that comes with a life so reliant on the land.

"Yesterday's red and yellow forest was transformed instantly into silver. Shrouded in a vast expanse of snowflakes, we and the reindeer were their slaves," she says of their constant struggle against the weather.

The Evenki's is a way of life where few get to die of old age, and where small mistakes or the spreading of diseases can have disastrous consequences on the lives of all. Where ancestral spirits, carved out of wood, are kept in deerskin pouches, and where the members of the tribe are powerless in the face of the first Japanese soldiers who come to recruit the men to fight, and later Chinese loggers who cut down the forest's trees.

What follows is a painful tale of strength and endurance, shamanism and death, of heartache, grudges and bonding, and, finally, of the end of a traditional way of life.

Along the way the woman loses two husbands to accidents (one freezes to death during a snowstorm while searching for lost reindeer; the other is killed by a bear). Finally she lives to see her people abandon their traditional, nomadic way of life. The younger generation all vote to move to a town, leaving behind the old woman who can't give up the only way of life she has ever known.

"There are fewer than two hundred Evenki living in the mountains now, and only six or seven hundred reindeer," she laments near the end of the story, which runs alongside the political upheavals of 20th-century China.

The Last Quarter of the Moon is a tale of timeless nomadic life threatened by politics and change.

The strength of the novel is that it doesn't preach a moral message about the negatives or positives of a changing way of life. It is neither a blinkered homage to nomadic life nor a moral tale of the benefits of modern life - it is simply a beautifully written story of the hardships one people survive, spoken by one of its last survivors.