From Amazon.co.uk
Journalist Sid Smith's debut novel is a brave excursion into little-known and alien territory. Armed with stocks of historical, political and medical information, he has somehow made the imaginative leap into a realm few understand: the sealed-off world of China during the Cultural Revolution.
James Stuart Fraser, a private in the British Army, deserts and ends up spending 35 years "among the unshiftable Chinese". Many of those years are spent in the wretched poverty of a village of the despised Miao people, where life revolves around the solitary buffalo. The incredible tedium of Fraser's rural subsistence (existence is too strong a term) is evoked in a taut prose, filled with enthralling and convincing detail.
However, as time passes Fraser grows aware of the pseudo-academic work going on at the clinic, where eugenicists wreak havoc with village life in their search for the scientific "truth" of race. As years suddenly pass in a paragraph, the pace races unannounced to thriller speed and the carefully wrought momentum Smith had achieved is lost. Notwithstanding, Smith has an important story to tell, and at its best, Something Like A House is very good indeed. --Alan Stewart
Review
Sid Smith's first novel is a shockingly unusual murder tale set in the peasant society of rural China - and a well-researched documentation of ancient tribal ritual and tradition and a chilling account of experimentation by China and other world powers in biological warfare and eugenics before, during and after the Cultural Revolution. Jim Fraser, a deserter from the British army in Korea, is captured and taken to a 'clinic' in a remote part of China, and is then transferred to a neighbouring peasant village inhabited by the ancient Miao tribe. There he whiles away the years in squalor and deprivation, working the land and observing the bizarre rituals of the villagers in their cult worship of the buffalo. There is a more sinister side to this life, though, as he witnesses horrifying acts of cannibalism, and when a village girl is brutally killed, the hunt for her murderer leads to the nearby 'clinic' and evidence of the germ warfare research carried out there using human guinea pigs. The prose is sparse, reflecting the brutality of the society and the dislocation of Fraser within it, and it carries us along relentlessly to a terrifying conclusion. Yet the writing is appallingly evocative of the squalid poverty of peasant life and the moral bankruptcy of Chinese society at that time, permeated as it is throughout with references to filth and excrement. The author describes the theme of his book as race, but more than that it is an intriguing mystery, a sinister insight into the horrors of germ weapons and a graphic portrayal of peasant life. (Kirkus UK)
