Mo Hayder - The Devil of Nanking (2005)
Reviewed by Fiona Walker
I came to The Devil of Nanking (or Tokyo, for practically everyone outside America) straight after reading another excellent thriller set in Japan, Susanna Jones’s Water Lily. Yet it would be hard to conceive of any two books being more different. All that unites them is their quality and beautiful, poetic style – though even that is vastly different. Water Lily’s is spare and delicate, The Devil of Nanking's gritty and elegiac. I recommend them both.
The Devil of Nanking tells two stories. The first is of Grey, who has come to the city to seek out an obscure piece of film, which depicts some of the horrific atrocities committed by the Japanese during the 1937 Nanking Massacre. Many people doubt that the film even exists: for Grey, it’s a quest that has tragic motivations at its heart, her sanity its stake
She hopes Shi Chongming, a visiting professor at the University of Todai, will be able to help her. He’s one of the few survivors of the massacre, and one report claims he is actually posses the film. However, he is unwilling to help her, and sends her away. Chongming’s story is the second, told through his harrowing diary extracts written during the events of 1937.
Desperate and alone in a strange city that is caught between the quirks of the Orient and the seductions of the Occident, Grey finds herself lodgings and takes a job as a hostess (informed by shades of Hayder’s own experience?) in a club that caters for all manner of wealthy Japanese men, including one of the most powerful and feared gangsters in the city.
The Devil of Nanking has been three years in the coming. Three long years. I would gladly wait that long again for another book of this quality from Hayder, who is certainly by far the best of the new generation of crime writers (incidentally, her next, The Creature, is due next February, in the UK at least). There is a wise and compassionate maturity to this third book (that wasn’t necessary in The Treatment), and there are some passages, especially in the later parts, that are so moving and affecting that they demand to be read over again. The book as a whole explores the line between ignorance and evil, and often demonstrates that the things we need to maintain our hold on life are not always the things best for us. Explored too is the nature of the relationship between the past and present, the circles that exist within history, spinning through time like fractals, repeating and repeating and repeating.
This is partly achieved by the way the two separate experiences – Grey’s life in 90’s Tokyo, and Chongming’s bizarre, idiosyncratic yet diabolically plain-in-the-writing diaries – toy with one another, connecting then bouncing off, reflecting then informing the other. In the end, the two strands mesh together in a conclusion that is possibly the most emotionally shattering I’ve read since that of her last book.
A couple of things should also be commented on. First, there is her excellent portrait of Tokyo, caught between two cultures, feeding off both in bizarre ways – huge posters of old American movie stars adorn the buildings; the manager of the club where Grey works has had surgery to look like Marilyn Monroe. It is a bizarre, surreal and yet perversely seductive city.
The second is the character of Grey. A “weirdo”, as she is constantly referred to by one of the characters, there are oblique and teasing reference to a “hospital” and “nurses”, which eventually become darkly, disturbingly clear. Psychologically damaged in ways we at first cannot comprehend, she is a fascinating, rather haunting spectral narrator, one of the marvels of this book. Come the conclusion, and its appalling significance, there is no doubt that she is the true dark heart of the piece. Simultaneously strong yet vulnerable, knowing and yet naïve, her character is where this novel’s devastatingly sharp edge lies.
The Devil of Nanking, a book in which the extensive and informative research always adds and is never intrusive, is an excellent thriller (though don’t expect a speedy read: here Hayder is not too concerned with the thrills of action), so haunting that, over a year later, I find that splinters of it are still caught in my mind.
Posted by Fiona Walker in Book Reviews | Permalink
