Midnight by Mao Dun
Published 1933 · 200,000 words · about 16 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Political Fiction
How hard is Midnight to read?
Midnight scores 55 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Technical vocabulary of bond trading, futures, silk manufacture and labour organising, unusual in Chinese fiction of the period.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Long descriptive periods in a European-influenced realist manner, denser than the plain style of most May Fourth fiction.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- The novel is built to demonstrate an economic thesis, and characters argue the thesis in dialogue as well as embodying it.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Around seventy named characters across finance, industry, labour and the intelligentsia, with market mechanics explained in detail.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- Omniscient and expository; the narrator explains motive and market position directly.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- The father's death on his first Shanghai night and the neon over the Bund do the symbolic work, and the novel does not push much further.
- Ironic distance: 54 out of 100
- Wu Sunfu's speeches about national industry are set against his lockouts and his thugs, and the gap is deliberate.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- The financial defeat is total and explicit, but the strike, the Party organisers and the countryside plot are left hanging.
- Structural complexity: 66 out of 100
- Multiple plot lines across factory, exchange, village and salon, with a huge cast and a panoramic method modelled on Zola and Tolstoy.
How Midnight is regarded
Midnight holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.