Mai Jia's newly translated first novel gives readers a glimpse of enigmatic China

Decoded
by Mai Jia
(translated by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne)
Allen Lane
4 stars

The hero of Decoded, Mai Jia's first novel to be translated into English, is Rong Jinzhen, although readers might spend much of this ambitious, unsettling and extraordinary story wondering whether hero is the right word.

Quiet, self-contained, perplexing, solitary, remote, sober, seemingly asexual (though his wife might disagree), Rong does little of note, at least in terms of action. "Due to his profession and overly cautious nature, to say nothing of his fear that something might happen, Rong Jinzhen was trapped within a valley of secrets … he had a singular attitude - stiff, almost suffocating. His only joy was to pass the time in a world of the imagination."

Rong is that tricky literary hero: the genius, whose mind is both the setting and the means for his triumphs, struggles, fears and downfall. In a way, his enemy is the rest of the world and everyone in it, who distract him from his purpose in life. His journey through Decoded is perhaps best expressed as a series of mental states: from innocence through the development of his capacious intellect to a breakdown that borders on insanity.

This is a novel not of thought, word and deed, but rather one where thought and word are deed.

Even this displays the kind of imprecision Rong would frown upon; his intellectual currency is numbers as much as language. A man of few words, Rong achieves respect as a cryptographer - a breaker rather than maker of codes.

Having distinguished himself as the foremost mathematician in a dynasty of wondrous mathematicians (his ancestor, "John Lillie", set up the world-famous N University), he is co-opted by the Chinese government to crack a series of apparently unbreakable ciphers.

This will either derail or save him from his true destiny, at least according to his mentor, Jan Liseiwicz, who wants his protégée to advance the field of artificial intelligence. Rong's story is mainly set in the 1950s and '60s when robots feel both imminent and impossibly exotic. Yet duty to his country beckons, or is forced upon him in the imposing figure of Zheng the Gimp. "If they want me to go, I don't have the right to refuse," Rong says to his distraught family.