BOOK (1942)

Monkey by Wu Ch'eng-en (translated by Arthur Waley) Penguin Classics

Here be monsters. Lots of them. About 30 pages into Arthur Waley's classic, if abridged English-language translation of the adventures of a Buddhist monk, Tripitaka, and his three supernatural disciples (Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy), we meet our first monstrous foe: the Demon of Havoc. The demon (whose skull Monkey cleaves in twain) is followed by a Dragon King (and his mother), a Star Spirit, the Spirit of the Planet Venus, a Red-Legged Immortal (Monkey in disguise), a One-Horned Ogre and the Dragon King's son - who eats Tripitaka's mount then turns himself into a horse to carry the monk for the rest of the journey.

Perhaps the first monster of all is Monkey himself. In the beginning was a stone egg, 'worked upon by the pure essences of Heaven and the fine savours of Earth'. This strange object 'became magically pregnant', split open and gave birth to a stone monkey with magical powers and some martial arts moves. Having proved his courage by entering the Cave of the Water Curtains, Monkey (or Sun Wukong) ascends to the title of Monkey King. His journey thereon in is one of sharp ups and downs: he quickly angers several gods, earns the respect of the Jade Emperor, angers the Jade Emperor and then becomes Tripitaka's disciple when his journey west begins.

It is a literary epic to place besides classics by Homer, Virgil and Dante. Yet it is also specific to its time and place: the substitution of earthly politicians and bureaucrats with heavenly saints is peculiar to Chinese literature. Monkey (or The Journey to the West) was published late in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty. The narrative re-imagines monk Xuanzang's real pilgrimage to India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts. While the quest is one of high devotion, the mood of Wu Ch'eng-en's book is anything but, veering wildly from comedy to fable, from moral instruction to wild adventure, from absurd satire to allegory.

Mixing fights, cowardice, lust, unruliness and friendship, the three disciples do their duty, albeit in haphazard and entertaining fashion. And everywhere they go, the monsters go too. Some are weirder than others. Take the one on old Mr Kao's farm. 'Three years ago [his daughter] was carried off by a monster, who since has kept her as his wife, and lived with her here on the farm.' Unsurprisingly, old Mr Kao is not pleased: 'To have a monster as a son-in-law in the house ... doesn't work very well.'

Monkey is all highly symbolic, of course: Tripitaka is an everyman; Monkey a wild, fluctuating genius. As for the monsters, they mean all sorts of things: greed, corruption, violence. Speaking for myself, I like to think of them as monsters, plain and simple: big, scary ones at that, even if they include the occasional son-in-law.