And it certainly shows what happened thirty years ago, in that famous concrete public area. It teaches anybody, if they needed telling, how graphic novels can at times be the perfect format for portraying such deathly serious subjects with emotional sympathy yet factual detail. None of that is here, and indeed I think of few flaws in looking back at this. I expected the horrors typical of books like this, as shown in this oh-too-recognisable extract from elsewhere:-Ĭharacter One – I shall tell you something obvious in the full knowledge you know it, because the author doesn't know how else to tell the reader it.Ĭharacter Two – I shall respond in suitable fashion to pretend this exposition did not happen, and that we are conversing like real characters would.

For a translation based on the memories of someone speaking their second language, it really works. But it's the text that did it for me, hitting what seemed a perfect tone in conveying the whole thing. The design of this graphic novel, a little staid and journalistic at first look, I thought, is ideal too – showing a fine balance between the personal and the political, between the objective and the subjective, between the reportage and the memoir. the people could not enter the Great Hall of the People…), we see the rabble-rousing editorials in the state newspaper that was the most rabble-y thing about the whole affair, and we see the whole protest begin to wind down, just before the tanks come in. We see them unable to attend the state funeral of someone they held dear (. But it's by no means a worthy, wordy background to it all, for we see the extended activities of the students.

It's that context that leaves me to agree with the foreword, that this is not an autobiography, neither of its author nor his fictional twin. This book is practically flawless in giving a general browser's context for the whole season of protests back in 1989. I certainly didn't know of the weeks of protests and hunger strikes from the students before the massacre and the birth of the Tank Man image, I didn't know how the area had long been a venue for political protest, and I didn't know more than a spit about the people involved on either side. I never really followed the events of Tiananmen Square with much attention when it was playing out – someone in the second half of their teens has other priorities, you know. Summary: The slightly unassuming design to this book does not disguise the fact it's a perfect primer for the political unrest in Beijing in 1989, with all the hows and whos and whys the average reader could need.

Tiananmen 1989 by Lun Zhang