Two years ago in The Spectator I praised Ha Jin’s earlier novel, Waiting. It was about a kindly, ineffectual army doctor who waits and waits for a divorce from his peasant wife so that he can marry a nurse, his lover without sex for 13 years. Ha, who teaches English at Boston University after learning it by listening to the World Service, came to the US in 1985 when he was 29. Waiting won the National Book Award. One of the reasons I liked that book was Ha’s creation of a world in which people acted naturally, like real Chinese, as their gripping story unfolded.
The problem with The Crazed is that the same Chinese habits are there, right down to smells, noises and stains, but the story, such as it is, plods. It centres on the dying Professor Yang, a teacher in a minor university, and his favourite graduate student, Jian, who looks after him in the hospital.
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