“Some things are too terrible to be true,” sang Bob Dylan on the album he released September 11, 2001. Fiction was invented—in part—to resolve the paradox, to give emotional body to the merely true, to give life where the recitation of facts and history bathes its subject in a deadening radiation of memory and catalogue. Mo Hayder’s The Devil of Nanking cannot have happened, and yet the acrid sting of truth emanates from the complicated story.
Could humans act as the protagonists in Ms. Hayder’s novel act? Evil actors abound in the book, but it is the ignorant innocents who challenge the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Those who face this challenge will find much reward in this difficult thriller. Not all will be able to stomach much of the material, nor should everyone make the attempt; assume any trigger warnings you like, and if you are swayed by such, perhaps best to glance wistfully behind you as you give this book a pass. The ignorant innocents are neither by the time The Devil of Nanking concludes, nor is the book’s reader.
I do not mention the specifics of the plot, as it may be best to come upon this novel unawares, with no preconceptions. There are plot holes and fortuitous circumstance, but the bifurcated story is a unitary whole, with a touching understanding of human psychology beneath some of its seemingly outré details. At the core of the human heart lie some things which cannot be said, because to say them would elide and erase their power, and they are very powerful things indeed. These things are things that ‘everybody’ knows, which makes them all the more shocking when we are forced to face them for the first or second or hundredth time. Such things cannot be seen or spoken of directly, but are always just out of reach. Bound by a strange presque vu geas to never be directly visible, like some optic variant of Tantalus, the deepest truths about we hairless apes must be talked around, hinted at, or shown in action rather than pinned down in an exhibit case. Mo Hayder accomplishes this feat in a rare bit of legerdemain.
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