Babylon, South Dakota Author: Tom Lin ISBN-13: 978031656576277Publisher: Little, BrownGuideline Price: ££25, 325 ppSaul Kang and his wife Mei Lee escape from China’s Cultural Revolution to a South Dakota farm and, like many American ranchers, acquire a television, a truck and sinister US government neighbours. They encounter blizzards of volcanic ash, prophetic murmurations of sparrows and a dog who, like his loyalty, never dies. In Babylon, South Dakota, Tom Lin’s uneven yet dazzling novel, there are biblical references, earth-shaking events and meditations on memory, metaphysics and what we leave behind when we are gone. Lin knows that to cast a spell, you must ground it in the mundane, so he juxtaposes strangeness with sweetly homespun moments. Readers with Chinese-immigrant parents may laugh at daughter Mara’s histrionics when her best friend tells her about hell (she baptises the family’s chickens). When Saul falls into a five-month coma, Mara paints his fingernails, and the family overhears his dreams, amplified like a shortwave radio: “the unmistakable sound of a hyacinth harvest, cicadas buzzing in the fields, the trickle of the canals.” Lin’s first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, also set in the West, about a 19th-century Chinese-American vigilante, was compared to Cormac McCarthy with its condensed, colourful violence. The more leisurely-paced Babylon nods to Marquez. The local doctor, Malachi Owens, peddles miraculous medicines and, like Marquez’s Melaquides, grows younger with time. The air teems with flying insects and ghosts abound.Other echoes lend a sense of familiarity: Cultural Revolution sagas, cold-war movies, John Steinbeck novels and even children’s classics, for despite the apocalyptic weather and nuclear silo next door, the family’s prairie existence is like from a storybook – growing chrysanthemums, herding cattle and selling picnic lunches by the road. It’s also an immigrant tale with its tropes cleverly reversed, for although Saul and Mei will find both gold and eternal life in the New World, they are seeking neither. A book this ambitious is bound to be slightly silly. Babylon’s central science-fiction conceit would not be out of place in a Marvel movie, and I found the absence of quotation marks to indicate dialogue confusing. Still, one of Babylon’s most inspiring aspects is how it reaches into our canon to create something surprising, like the greenhouse that Saul panels with stained glass fragments ( “blue-green shards, which came from the window depicting Jonas being thrown overboard into a churning sea”) repurposed from a local church. The author, like his heroes, has dared to dream, and when his novel is finished, its traces remain.Mei Chin is a writer from New York City living in Dublin