Decoded by Mai Jia review – 'An intriguing Chinese thriller'

It is hard to avoid the thought that the hero of Mai Jia's debut novel, Decoded, first published in China in 2005 and now translated into English, has more than a little autobiography in his makeup. The main character, Rong Jizhen, suffers a solitary childhood: he is an isolated outsider who is recruited to a secret military cryptography unit. Mai Jia (the pen name of Jiang Benhu) spent 17 years in an intelligence unit of the People's Liberation Army; and according to his publishers, he was so isolated as a child that he lost himself in keeping a diary which grew to 36 volumes, testament to a dramatic alienation and an obsession with writing. Both are in evidence in Decoded.

As his publishers put it, deftly combining mangled prose with a patronising attitude to their readers, "Mai Jia may be the most popular writer in the world you've never heard of." To decode the battered meaning of that sentence, it is useful to know that Mai Jia's novels sell well in China and have inspired both television and film adaptations, and that Decoded is the first of his works to be translated into English. Credit is due to the translator, Olivia Milburn, whose elegant prose serves the author and the reader well.

Mai Jia is described as a thriller writer, though a reader who anticipates an action-packed page-turner may find Decoded disappointing: intriguing, certainly, but racy it is not. The author prefers to describe himself as concerned with "people who experience occupational alienation" – in this case, he is talking about cryptography, but the reference is equally applicable to his own lonely profession.

The story begins in the 19th century, with the history of the Rong family, prosperous salt merchants in south China, who dispatch one young family member, Rong Zilai, to the US to learn the art of interpreting dreams from a US-based master. They hope that Rong Zilai will eventually be able to alleviate the tormented dream life of the family matriarch, but her early death renders his mission redundant. He studies mathematics instead, returning to China seven years later to found a school that will grow into a renowned university.

As the Rong family's prosperity fades, their reputation for maths grows. The school, unusually, admits women, and a number of mathematically talented Rong women appear, notably "Abacus" Rong, whose brilliant career is cut short when she dies giving birth to her son. The child, promptly nicknamed "Killerhead", brings no credit to the family, and the author sends him, too, to an early grave. Killerhead's own posthumous and illegitimate son, reluctantly acknowledged by the family, is our hero Rong Jizhen, though he migrates through several names and nicknames before arriving at this one.

The odd little outcast, whose mother, too, died giving birth, is taken in by a Mr Auslander, an elderly foreigner who has washed up in the family compound. On Mr Auslander's death, Rong Zilai, the family's mathematical pioneer, intrigued by the child's uncanny ability, carries him off to the university, where his talent is further fostered by Jan Lesiewicz, a Polish Jew and mathematical genius, who is stranded in China by the second world war.

It is this relationship that is at the heart of the subsequent narrative, with its generally intriguing combination of loyalty and mistrust, mutual suspicion and fellow feeling, identity and shapeshifting. Lesiewicz hopes that Jinzhen will devote himself to artificial intelligence, but instead, the young man is recruited to a top-secret Chinese cryptography unit where he is set to work on the two most difficult codes that the enemy has produced. Liesewicz, who warns him that cryptography leads to madness, is now in the enemy camp, in the US, where he, too, has strayed into cryptography.

The narrative arc of the book is the author's own quest for the truth about the secret lives of Jinzhen and Liesewicz, against a backdrop of state secrecy, deepening antagonism between the US and China, and the tightening grip of the communist state on the lives of its citizens. The narrator crisscrosses China, tracking down key witnesses, to reconstruct Jinzhen's life, and part of the narrative is told in the accounts of those who knew him. The novel is also, in its way, an exercise in ambiguity and coded references, and can be read as a lightly coded allegory of the troubled relationship of the citizen with an all‑powerful state.

It is also deft in its exploration of the world of mathematics and of cryptography, managing to evoke the labyrinthine uncertainties and paradoxes of the black art and the obsessions of those who practise it. Despite its shortcomings, it left this reader with an appetite for more from this unusual writer.