As Graeme Mathieson implies, The Dragon's Tail is not a straightforward spy novel. Adam Williams has written a true epic, spanning many decades and incorporating real events of magnitude. Williams must have put some of himself into the character of Harry, who has a sort of love affair with China, first adoring the country, then missing it painfully and then becoming disillusioned with the impact of the Cultural Revolution.

Harry's love for the girl sent to entrap him was rather corny, but the real love story, that between the various protagonists and China, was handled with grace. The Dragon's Tail was by turns informative and riveting and, crucially, not lecturing. You learn as you read whether you try to or not. It is not easy to explain historical context entertainingly, but Williams pulls it off.

Star Letter

It is interesting that Adam Williams makes reference to the fact that his novel was “getting so grim”. I expected some escapism from a spy novel but instead found myself reading more than I wanted to about China's labour camps. Yet this was still an absorbing read. There were plenty of surprises and twists in the plot and it is to the author's credit that I did not become confused by them all. Just when I had congratulated myself on having guessed what Harry Airton's next ruse might be, the storyline swerved away from me again. All that double bluffing between Harry and Chen Tao was not realistic but it was great fun to read and I will seek out more books by Williams.
Graeme Mathieson, Cumbria

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This week, the author tells Alyson Rudd why the Olympics meant so much to China and how the Cultural Revolution made provided an ideal backdrop for his characters

ALYSON RUDD China worked so hard to be perfect Olympic hosts. Did they succeed?

ADAM WILLIAMS Every Olympic aficionado I know returned dazzled by the professionalism and organisation. And the Chinese people are basking in patriotism. For them the Games rubbed out a century of perceived humiliation — the Games brought pleasure and pride to every household.

What was your reaction to the Games?

Relief that it all went so well. This has been a dreadful year in China with hideous snowstorms, riots in Tibet, terrorist violence and an horrific earthquake. That spectators from all over the planet could walk away saying these are the best Games ever is good news or China and for long-time residents such as me.

In your afterword you state that only a blindfolded churl would not concede the freedoms that have come with China’s economic development. Do we fail to admire China’s progress in relative terms?

I stand by that statement. The economic development of the past 30 years has brought normality back from the Ground Zero of the Cultural Revolution. You could argue that the Chinese Government has presided in fits and starts over the fastest improvement of basic human rights in history – the right to eat, to choose a job, to live without thought control. Today it is laying down the building blocks of a civil society and political reform is on the agenda. I sometimes think that China is like Britain before the Lady Chatterley trial and That Was The Week That Was. There may be censorship, but there’s no control over free speech, and today the Chinese Government cannot afford to ignore the aspirations of its people.

The parallels between the labour camps you describe and Stalin’s are obvious, but what was different?

Stalin didn’t use thought control. His prisoners were cattle. So were Mao’s, but Mao’s herds were brainwashed to think like him. No deviation was tolerated by camp guards, or indeed the prisoners.

This is an epic novel. What drives the storytelling, the individuals or the historical context?

The circumstances of the Cultural Revolution were a perfect backdrop for the tale of political madness I wanted to tell — but primarily I wanted to offer a more universal story of how ordinary people can discover within themselves the resilience to survive intolerable hardships, preserving their humanity and coming to terms with the compromises each has made. It takes a personal story set in a certain time and place to illustrate that theme.

Technician Li has a small part but was, I thought, crucial in providing a burst of humour and conveying that all echelons of power felt fear of committing the smallest slight against Mao. Was Li vital?

Yes. The story was getting so grim that the novel needed some relief. I made Li a priest of the religious cult of Mao’s mangoes. Originally Mao’s gift to a group of revolutionary workers, the fruit came to symbolise Mao himself. Mangoes were carried in procession round the country and you could be shot if you said they looked like dried potatoes. On one level the lunacy of it was funny. On another it symbolised the tragedy of a revolution devouring itself.

The most tenacious characters are female. Is this because the plot required strong women or were you drawing upon real examples?

In my story, Ziwei, after years in a labour camp, establishes a Sichuanese restaurant that challenges the Establishment. Such a restaurant did open in Beijing in the late Eighties, was closed repeatedly and every time was reopened by its extraordinary proprietress with more provocative panache. I admired the brave, insolent woman who ran it and always wondered about her background.

My Ziwei bears no resemblance to her except that both ran daring restaurants, yet I like to think I may have captured in my invented character some of the universal qualities that allowed people like that restaurant owner to survive Mao’s horrors with their humanity and spirit intact.

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Have you enjoyed the Olympics? Did you find yourself wondering just how much you really know about China? If your interest was piqued at all then The Dragon's Tail is required reading. If your senses were not stirred in the slightest then The Dragon's Tail, even in the unlikely event that it fails to prompt a mild fascination with modern China, is still worth reading as a highly absorbing thriller.

The novel's hero is Harry Airton, a British spy. He was raised in 1930s China, a place he romanticised after he was shipped to Scotland to escape the war. Airton returns to Beijing to play the role of a scientist who might be tempted to divulge nuclear secrets to Mao's regime. He is, as his British boss suspects, not an entirely predictable personality and, as a consequence, the game of bluff and counterbluff snowballs out of control.

The novel becomes darker as Adam Williams details life in the labour camps as endured by those who failed to live up to the ideals of the Cultural Revolution. Loud, hungry mosquitoes greet inmates as they arrive. Plump women quickly become skeletal, and ways have to be found to stave off disease and starvation. Prisoners can forge friendships, hunt for vermin or turn on one another.

The novel has as its climax the scenes of revolt in Tiananmen Square in 1989 but Williams deserves to be allowed to borrow the most iconic moment in China's recent history as he places it in context and by explains why hosting the Games meant so much to the Chinese Government and its people.

The Dragon's Tail by Adam Williams
Hodder, £7.99; 608pp Buy the book

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