For its organizing metaphor alone, Beijing Coma is a landmark in contemporary Chinese literature. Ma Jian is arguably his country's essential writer, and his latest novel, a sprawling, visionary meditation on the fate of the individual within China's big zone of authoritarianism, achieves the stature of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago as witness, and the resonance of Kafka's The Trial as parable. That is some company to keep.

How Beijing Coma organizes itself, and how it "sprawls," is remarkable. It is a 586-page novel trapped in the head of a coma patient who has lain immobile for a decade, able to hear, smell and remember, unable to see, speak or respond. There are no chapter divisions or narrative breaks; Ma plants the reader inside Dai Wei's crippled body and cloistered consciousness, and offers scant respite.

At the same time, the novel unfolds the most public story in recent Chinese history: the astonishing, heart-breaking democracy movement of spring, 1989, and the subsequent June 4 massacre by the army, at the behest of triumphant conservative forces with the government, of its own citizens. Dai Wei, shot in the head by a soldier in a city street, is one such citizen.

The central metaphor, then, is of an apparent human vegetable both "witnessing" the truth of 1989 and "seeing" the patterns of oppression and amnesia so embedded in Chinese history, while those around him, ostensibly sensate and responsive, can't see or witness much at all. Of such expressed audacity are troubles easily found in the People's Republic. No surprise, Ma Jian lives in London. His books, including this one, are banned in his homeland.

Dai Wei, in contrast, has had to live his entire life inside the zone. A native of Beijing, he grows up amid the wreckage of earlier spasms of absolutist control, and the less evident presence of enduring cultural mechanisms for crushing the individual. His musician father, condemned as a "rightist" for shaking the hand of a Western composer after a performance, is imprisoned for two decades and dies broken.

His mother's own musical career is likewise ruined, and she carries memories of the nightmares visited upon her landowning family in the early days of the Mao Zedong era. As such, Dai Wei's emergence into adulthood has involved negotiating the lengthy, ever-darker corridor of Mao's 30-year exercise in cloaking emperor-like absolutism in the fabric of peasant revolution.

He experiences the madness in ways small – a neighbour informing on him for kissing a girl, leading to police interrogation and a beating – and large: On a trip in southern China to visit a prison camp where his father had been incarcerated, he learns of the hushed-up legacy of forced cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution.

The result is an independent young man who has been programmed from birth to accept, like it or not, extraordinary degrees of suppression of his every act and impulse. When Dai Wei winds up a graduate student at Beijing University in 1987 and into 1988, a period when the country seemed receptive to having certain national assumptions probed, he fits the profile of a likely activist.

So begins the unravelling of his brief time as a wakeful citizen. Some three-quarters of Beijing Coma is committed to a fictional recreation of the democracy movement, from its earliest days on campus to its penultimate expression during the occupation of Tiananmen Square, including the hunger strike.

Ma Jian changes the names of the more prominent student leaders, but only barely; he nestles his protagonist among the upper echelon of activists, but makes him a low-key presence, more witness than participant. Hundreds of pages of the arguments, frustrations, caprices, errors and acts of heroism of the suicidally courageous men and women, most of them in their early twenties, who ended up challenging the Chinese government's right to rule, isn't always easy reading – either simply to follow, given the bewildering array of names, or to fathom as essential material.

The bulk is integral, though, both to the schema of Beijing Coma as a novel and to Ma Jian's conception of art as one of the few places where reality can't be lobotomized and people can't be induced into states of forgetting. To that end, every variety of collectively held secret, or rumour known to be fact, about various upheavals since 1949 gets outed in the book. It is a kind of frenzy of truth-speaking from exile – raw and horrifying.

When the coma victim, still being harassed by authorities years after June 4, but otherwise forgotten in the "new" China of rapid material prosperity, is himself cannibalized for body parts and magical potions, Ma's central metaphor, no less truthful than those facts, becomes almost unbearable to contemplate. That it is simultaneously a thing of aesthetic and moral beauty is some consolation.