MA JIAN'S epic novel is the first major work of fiction on the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and the events that ended with the Communist leadership sending in the army on June 4 in a defining moment of China's modern history. As such, the book is a huge achievement, mixing imagination and fact as it charts in compelling close-up the complex and heady nature of the Beijing Spring, which was joined by hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the capital.

But it is considerably more than this - a landmark account through fiction of a country whose rise has amazed the world, but which remains cloaked in shadows that may be best explored through a novel that is both intimate and sweeping.

In his latest book, Ma Jian, who first left the People's Republic in 1987, returned to support the 1989 protests and now lives in London, surpasses his previous achievements (banned in China) with his no-holds-barred stories about Tibet, Stick Out Your Tongue, and his equally frank and compelling account of present-day China, Red Dust.

Here, he employs a telling inversion by taking as his narrator and central character a young man in a coma after being shot in the massacre on June 4. Dai Wei's body is trapped “like a thick cotton thread caught in the eye of a needle”, but his mind is free, drifting “through an ocean of thoughts like a silent submarine”.

Reverse the process and one confronts a China whose mind has been officially trapped since 1989 while its physical presence is free to expand by leaps and bounds.

Beyond the central element of the Beijing Spring, the wider story of China evolves over the past half-century through episodes from Dai's life that bring alive the sufferings of the Chinese people and deftly explore human relationship under a regime which brooks no dissent and lives on its own version of history.

There is the great-uncle who was forced to bury his father alive during the land reform of the 1950s after he had been branded “an evil tyrant” for owning two fields and three cows. There is Dai's father, sent as a rightist to a camp where his teeth fell out, who comes home in 1980 and promises his son he will get him to Harvard (where the chairs in the classrooms have such fine spring upholstering that “you never want to stand up again”) while his wife warns him not to “corrupt your sons with your liberal thoughts”.

There is the story from the camp of the healthiest-looking inmate, Old Li, who kept himself fed by eating maggots from the cesspit and scraping pieces of undigested yam from the excrement of fellow prisoners.

There is the drama in the early 1970s when, not having any lavatory paper, Dai tears a corner from a Maoist big-character poster, provoking a terrorising tirade from the neighbourhood chairwoman who takes the opportunity to upbraid the boy for playing with the bells of bicycles parked in the quarter. In a vividly told scene in the materialistic China that has evolved since market-led economic change began 30 years ago, one of the comatose man's kidneys is removed to be transplanted into a rich colliery owner to provide money for his widowed mother, and his urine is drained for its supposedly medicinal benefits.

Meanwhile, Dai Wei thinks of his companions in Tiananmen who survived to go their separate ways - one runs snack bars in Taiwan, another is doing a PhD in political science in America and a third has become a Catholic priest in France.

Finely written and translated, with beautifully controlled interaction between the actors, the book's account of life and love in the square in 1989 brings out the complexity of the movement that reached well beyond the traditional description of it as a pro-democracy revolt.

Above all, the Beijing Spring provided the participants with “a warm space with a beating heart” and reasons for soaring hope - but was also shot through with inevitable differences, rivalries and bickering. The characters, some of them real people appearing in roman à clef roles, take on depth and meaning as the story moves towards tragedy, on both a personal and a wider level.

Nineteen years on, June 4 is still off limits for discussion in China, yet another of the episodes on which the leaders of the People's Republic prefer to impose a coma of orthodoxy while hoping that economic growth will provide them with the legitimacy denied by the protestors.

Sadly, the richness and humanity of Ma Jian's book shows why this remains the case.

Beijing Coma by Ma Jiang
Chatto & Windus, pp586, £17.99 Buy the book here

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