Decoded: A Novel Mai Jia (Translated by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne). Allen Lane/Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 2014.

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An autistic boy is born out of wedlock, descended from a mathematical-genius grandmother who helped the Wright brothers to design their first planes. The boy is a maths prodigy himself, and eventually becomes the top code-breaker in the Chinese military — but is tormented by the psychological contradictions of cryptography. However implausible-sounding the story of Mai Jia's breakthrough 2002 novel Jie Mi (Decoded), this is a spy thriller grounded in subtle and difficult realities. Mai — one of China's pre-eminent writers — is alleged to have worked in cryptography himself. The battle in the reader's mind over whether this is florid drama or brutal realism is perhaps the primary and primal attraction of the novel, translated into English for the first time by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne.

Decoded is written in the style of a film script, with rapid cutting between scenes and the reader thoroughly gripped by the characters' tribulations. It is also necessarily dressed up with copious references to mathematics — names of mathematicians, theorems, and encoding and decoding methods — and even includes a few formulae. Yet its main theme is human psychology, and especially the tortured psyches of those who, like protagonist Rong Jinzhen, spend their lives trying either to hide information or to crack the protective puzzles of their enemies. Rong's old tutor, for instance, writes to his former protégé, condemning decryption and cipher construction as “fundamentally anti-scientific, anti-intellectual ... a poison that mankind has developed to destroy science and a conspiracy against the people that work with them”.

Bestselling novelist Mai Jia is alleged to have worked in cryptography. Credit: Grayhawk Agency

The translation is good overall, but there are a few fatal errors. For example, Mai takes a swipe at Chinese higher education, pointing out that a major problem with Chinese academics is that they start out as scholars and end their careers as government officials; he hints that they regard this path as a most desirable and natural progression. As the translation has it, however, Chinese academics regard scholarship and officialdom as incompatible — the exact opposite of Mai's meaning.

Another lapse undermines a central tenet of the novel: the supposed accepted wisdom in cryptography that one person can only design, or crack, one good cipher at most. This is because cryptographers can be made vulnerable both by subconscious similarities in their own ciphers, and by the exposure of their specific code-breaking strengths when they crack other people's ciphers. Yet the English version translates this as it being impossible for one person to be both a cipher designer and a code-breaker. As a result, readers might not fully understand the tragedy of the story — that a man who successfully broke the enemy's sophisticated Code Purple goes mad at failing to break its successor.

Decoded is dressed up with references to mathematics, yet its main theme is human psychology.

With this and subsequent novels such as the 2003 An Suan (In the Dark, forthcoming from Penguin) selling in their millions and being adapted into high-profile television series, Mai has firmly established himself as the father of modern Chinese espionage thrillers. Critical acclaim for his work has included China's most prestigious book award, the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

So is Mai — the supreme storyteller of psychological warfare, intrigue and the human sufferings of alienation — a brave writer who unveils national security programmes and pinpoints untold human sacrifices in a secretive state? Or is he a commercial master who plays on the public's desire to peer into a covered-up world in a country where media is officially controlled and pumps out content-free content every day? Is he exploiting the public's wish to believe that an outrageous, even over-dramatized story is the best vehicle through which to tell an untellable truth?

Even publishers had difficulty answering this question. As Mai relates in an appendix to a 2011 Chinese edition, he first submitted the manuscript of Decoded to two friendly publishing houses. Both editors quickly rejected his work. One thought the story too fake to attract interest; the other felt it was too real and sensitive, and could cause trouble for the publisher. Decoding Mai Jia's real intentions is perhaps the book's most perplexing challenge.