Review
UFO in Her Eyes
2009
Chatto & Windus
Review by Peter Young in Big Sky #1 (2013).
Guo’s debut in English Village of Stone was an ultimately great read; I’ve still not read her two other intervening novels but this one was a must-see. Given the title, her concerns aren’t in the least science fictional and the UFO is merely a McGuffin for some Chinese government officials investigating the sighting, something that sets off all the subsequent events. This is a crossover story in a number of ways: what we have in book form has been modelled as a lively film script, a format Guo-the-filmmaker clearly wants to do as a book in its own right; meanwhile Guo-the-author is bringing a couple of predominantly Western cultural facets (UFOs and 9/11) and shoe-horning them into her own unsuspecting culture, a near-future rural China, with the result of rapid and mostly unnecessary development that changes the face of a town while leaving its people behind. In hardcover it’s a beautifully produced book that’s typographically inventive with plenty of stuff that makes the pages turn fast, but I found as a whole the story lacks much substance; by the end one is asking what has everyone achieved apart from putting the small town of Silver Hill a little more prominently on the 21st Century Chinese cultural map. The multiple viewpoints work together well with much wit and profanity (but again, at the expense of characterisation); the interview format for the entire book is original but it’s a novel that doesn’t do much more than scratch at some surfaces despite some clearly referenced gender and class issues. But after everything’s said and done, the novel is meant to be fun and it is certainly that.
