[In the following review, Tonkin briefly compares Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard with John le Carré’s Our Game.]

Timothy Mo and John le Carré have both written novels that pit conscience against corruption in a lawless post-imperial world, “without faith or anti-faith”. Look at how these two books have been published, though, and you see a curious mirror-effect. Both authors have behaved in ways that flatly contradict their novels’ drift. Mo the sneering fatalist has acted like a hero; while Le Carré the knightly champion of rights has hitched his name to big-power bullying.

Mo’s cloacal romp Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard —set in a Philippines portrayed as one vast sewer—cynically assumes that the rich and violent will dump on the poor for ever, whatever label the big shots happen to wear. “Same scheiss only different flies,” as Mo’s gross but shrewd German Asia-watcher says.

Meanwhile, in another part of the east, le Carré’s Our Game sends his usual cast of dysfunctional toffs into the anarchic post-Soviet Caucasus. They likewise find that, to the grubby “whorehouse alliance” that now binds Russia and the west, “minority rights can seriously threaten world health”. But where Mo smirks and jests at naked power, le Carré moums and rails. Larry Pettifer, a bohemian British double-agent, has gone to seek martyrdom with the Ingush rebels against Yeltsin. He aims to play Lord Byron to these Muslim mountaineers that Moscow calls “black arses”. Le Carré gives his tight-laced pursuer, the retired spy Cranmer, some sensible thoughts about non-intervention in this “string of Bosnias waiting to happen”. However, the novel’s logic and language side with the embattled little guys.

Neither book matches its author’s best. Mo’s crew of simpatico Filipinos vanish halfway through as he segues into a laborious anti-PC satire set at a conference full of “Turd World” liberals. Our Game grips harder and digs deeper into the psychology of a time that prefers bazookas to beliefs. But Le Carré’s disdain for post-Thatcherland—its brutal policemen, dull students, creepy apparatchiks—isn’t always matched by an ear for these voices. (Though I can forgive him a lot for calling a dodgy arms dealer “Aitken”.)

In Brownout, Mo does very little to countermand the view that “everything was so interconnected and the vested interests so powerful that change for the better was impossible.” Yet he has, famously, cut loose from corporate publishing to produce and market this book as a one-man band. With 10,000 copies shifted already, his bold venture has been vindicated. He has trounced “vested interests”. …