There’s something immensely encouraging, perhaps inevitable, about François Laurent-Decare’s latest project. A masterpiece of literature, Western Journey is this generation’s geminae-extraordinaire, a work I predict is destined to be unsurpassed for centuries. Immortal use of language, sublime intricacy in its wordplay, and astonishing thematic relevance; Western Journey is ambrosia prose translated for the masses.

I picked up the novel at one of the new Penguin Random House vending machines – futuristic gadgets placed across major spots in London that I’m sure you will have spotted in your travels. £18 and two hours later, the machine had produced the entire novel for me, a fantastic print-on-demand service that I shall be reviewing in the coming months.

Of course, when one first picks up Western Journey, one notices the novel is a direct, word-for-word translation of the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, attributed to Wu Cheng’en. I have had several uneducated ignoramuses suggest Western Journey is simply a reprint of that Ming dynasty work, complete with Chinese-style bookbinding and East Asian marginalia. Of course, one with any insight into Laurent-Decare’s history of writing knows that is not the case – one need only look at his 1991 translation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to see that his identical rendition of the story was not mere replication, that it instead far surpassed the original. Doesn’t the character of Friday have far more poignancy when written by a modern author, rather than one from the 18th century? Is Crusoe’s relationship with nature, animal, and man not infinitely more nuanced in our modern age than in 1719? Defoe’s Crusoe was inexorable; Laurent-Decare’s was what? Inconceivable?

And, as he did back with Robinson Crusoe, Laurent-Decare has done something special with this new novel. His translation – work that has taken him forty-seven years and two marriages, if rumours are to be believed – is not in English, nor French. No German, no Dutch. No, Laurent-Decare has taken the most courageous stance possible and rewritten the entire work in the language it was first written in – 16th century Chinese. Now, one without knowledge of pinyin and the Chinese language may struggle with the text; indeed, having never learnt the language I struggled at times but that is not the point.

Western Journey does not need to be read, for simply looking at the characters you innately obtain a vast sense of its exploration of existence, snapshots of modern life filtered through his incredible knowledge of Chinese myth and expressed in a language unreadable to most in the Western world. To see the brushstrokes is enough to understand Laurent-Decare; that is if such a thing is possible. Such bravery!

Yet, the most daring thing about the novel is that it is entirely unfinished. In a stroke of literary genius, Laurent-Decare has ascended the boundaries of art, of literature, of what we believe a novel should be. In one fell swoop of heroism he has gone where none have dared tread – audacity beyond comparison – as he boldly leaves the work unfinished, untranslated. Indeed, in the footnotes (which incidentally run longer than the novel and are in French), François speaks of the difficulties of translating a work he could not read, how it took him decades to learn how to imitate the brushstrokes of Chinese characters. In his darkest hours, he even considered (if only for a brief moment) translating the original Journey to the West into English or even (God forbid!) French, his birth language. But, thankfully for all of us mere mortals, he conceded that the idea was cowardly, a clumsy exercise in mimicry that was below his genius. Instead, Laurent-Decare resigned himself to the unenviable, inevitable, and perhaps even martyrdom-esque task of writing Western Journey in that original Chinese language. In doing so, he has created a work that far surpasses the original, an expanded abridgement that extends itself far beyond Journey to the West (literally, thanks to the footnotes).

To illustrate the above points, please, compare the following two passages (I have had them translated back into English by a colleague, for ease of reading). First, a simple passage from the original text Journey to the West:

There is nothing for it but to work hard early and late. Now my mother is old and I dare not leave her.

Now, that very same passage from Laurent-Decare’s Western Journey:

There is nothing for it but to work hard early and late. Now my mother is old and I dare not leave her.

The difference is extraordinary. The first is quaint, to be sure, a cute insight into 16th-century China and its traditions of work and labour. But in his contemporary reimagining, Laurent-Decare has elevated it to new heights – it’s as if one feels the weight of the entirety of human history on his shoulders as he muses on life, work, and death. The latter is more subtle, finer in every detail. We feel the crushing, almost impossibly difficult work faced by the character as Laurent-Decare carries us through exhausting workday after exhausting workday. We weep at the tragedy of the mother before Laurent-Decare transcends an individual’s ageing frailty to bring us face-to-face with the ageing frailty of all humankind, a stunning metaphor that is nowhere to be found in the original work. With Western Journey, Laurent-Decare has done the unthinkable in translating and improving upon that ancient text and, well… Re-read those excerpts above if you are still unsure of the genius.

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N.B. It has come to my attention that the vending machine that printed my review edition of Western Journey copied and translated Laurent-Decare’s novel into binary code before the printing began. As one can imagine, the effect of this was close to heart-breaking and has rendered the entire above review redundant; one cannot begin to see the true genius of Laurent-Decare’s work on a mass-printed parchment. How could a digital replication of decades of self-taught Chinese brushstrokes be anything but insulting? Indeed, when I purchased my copy of Western Journey, I believed the vending machine would be printing via more traditional methods, perhaps with some sort of mechanical calligraphy brush inside the machine. This shocking oversight from Penguin Random House is an affront to Laurent-Decare and his ground-breaking effort, diluting his great work of stroke-for-stroke translation into a lifeless mechanical duplicate. Is nothing sacred?

Stefan Matthews is a screenwriter and graduate from Bournemouth University. He is a dream-smith, an illusion-weaver, a forger of fantasia. Well, that’s what he claims.