[In the following review, Billen focuses on the tone and theme of The Redundancy of Courage.]

The title of Timothy Mo’s fourth novel both captures its sardonic tone and crystallises the question it asks. If death refuses to be out-stared, is bravery in its face an irrelevance? The Redundancy of Courage asks the same question about heroism as Lord Jim, whose location it recalls, and The Red Badge of Courage, whose title it modifies. It refuses to give a straight answer. It redirects the question at the reader.

Mo’s narrator is Ng, a Western-educated Chinese man, who has returned to Danu, his native island in the Timor Sea, and built a hotel. Asking us to simulate the strain of a constipated bowel-movement when pronouncing his name, Ng describes himself as a “citizen of the world and a misfit”, a “coward”, a “fool”, a “Chinese faggot”.

It is a time for courage, not a time for Ng. When the capital is bloodily invaded by soldiers from the neighbouring state, he is preoccupied by the sequestration of his flush-lavatories. Yet when press-ganged into the rebel forces in the mountains, he proves himself, first as their ingenious bomb-smith and then by his physical daring.

Yet his interest in incendiary devices is border-line sadism. He can’t pluck a coconut tree without calling it a castration, or describe a killing without letting us know which limb went where. Milking his hill-top heroics when recounting them to his comrades, he presents them to us as the easy option.

War turns societies inside out, randomly making friends of enemies and brave men of cowards like Ng. Mo asks us to believe that the true hero, like the rebel leader Osvaldo, is immutable because of his unquestioning sense of himself. Osvaldos are not so rare: even Danu will throw up another “dinosaur in an age of pettiness”. Doomed to fail, is their heroism otiose? Mo’s brilliant, mercilessly-told adventure story arcs into a perfect question-mark.