[In the following review, Friedland identifies the sources for Mo’s material in The Redundancy of Courage and comments on the author’s treatment of such.]

Adolph Ng, the protagonist of Timothy Mo’s new novel [The Redundancy of Courage], is a fish out of water, doubly so. He is Chinese and gay. He lives in a wretched backwater called Danu, a former Portuguese territory “north of Australia” that has been brutally occupied by the neighbouring “malais.” Through inexorable fate Ng, the proprietor of the only good hotel in town, becomes a reluctant, and then expert, jungle fighter.

Throughout his transformation from urbane innkeeper to erstwhile guerilla, Ng keeps up a wry, self-deprecating patter; he is a kind of Truman Capote in Conradland. “A man of the modern world” who ends up “grubbing in the soil for the booty of inedible tubers and larvae,” a cafe charmer who makes booby traps with triggers so fine that they do in a “malais” infantryman but leave the villager unharmed.

The invention of Adolph Ng signals Mo’s return to form after his hugely ambitious and ultimately unrewarding An Insular Possession. Instead of stressing his technical virtuosity, a strategy that made his earlier novel all but unreadable, Mo tells the story of Adolph Ng plainly and well. The Redundancy of Courage takes its cues from Graham Greene rather than Anthony Burgess.

Clutter is not necessary given the raw material Mo works from. The tragedy of Indonesia’s forcible annexation of East Timor in 1975 and its subsequent efforts to suppress the Fretilin independence movement forms an easily adaptable basis for good fiction. And Mo sticks close to the known facts, using real history to form a fictional crucible where fear, brutality and compromise rule the human condition.

From the moment that Ng sees “parachutes dropping; drifting as if they were thistledown or broken cotton-pods: silent smooth and white,” life in the colonial-afterthought of Danu changes. What had been a conflict where “brother fought brother, son father, cousins their uncles” (mostly over endless cups of espresso) is overtaken by the machinery of modern warfare, by the clinical brutality of an unemotional occupying army.

Once the odd man out in the communal rivalry which grips the Danuese, Ng can no longer be “a ‘blind’ Chinaman with his eyes in the trough along with his snout.” Although he cooperates with his occupiers, Ng does little things to tempt fate, like stealing food from the “malais” pantry for his friend Rosa’s creche. Ng feels an intellectual, if not an emotional, tie to his revolutionary Danuese friends and schoolmates who have taken to the hills as the leaders of the FAKINTIL insurgent army.

Ng does not have to struggle with the role of discomfited quisling for long. He is conscripted by his rifle-wielding fellow-members of “The Literary Society of Danu” during a raid on the hotel. High in the Danu mountains, he is brought to Osvaldo, the noble but calculating leader of FAKINTIL.

At first, it is a “Boy’s Own” kind of life on the run. Osvaldo, the brilliant tactician, leads his merry band to violent success after success. He is a Maoist Robin Hood for the Danuese and the “useless Chinaman” cannot help but rise to the occasion. “It was a craft—mining, booby trapping—that was peculiarly Chinese,” Ng exults as he invents another low-tech lethal weapon. “I mean in its ingenuity, in its low smallmindedness, its attention to detail, its pettifogging neatness … Oh, it was me OK, the Chinese sapper.”

The fun of it does not last for long. Soon, the “malais” are dropping napalm, leaving the FAKINTIL dead like “burnt chickens, legs curled and shrivelled.” The plucky hunters become the hunted. Food runs out, men desert and children are killed. The brilliant tactician becomes erratic, desperate. Osvaldo becomes, in the words of his brother, the “Robespierre of our Revolution,” sacrificing his own force for an unattainable greater glory.

Mo uses actual episodes from non-Indonesian accounts of the Timor war as his set pieces. The FAKINTIL fighters are faced with a “human fence” of Danuese fronting a “malais” advance, shooting their way through on “full auto and fuck fire control” to save their own hides. The end of FAKINTIL (though not in reality of Fretilin, though it made the same near-suicidal move) comes when Osvaldo and his ragged bunch storm the television tower outside the “malais” garrison.

By this climactic battle, Ng has already been captured, a servant now in the house of the “malais” commander Colonel Goreng and his manipulative wife. He has gone back to putting his nose in the trough, trying to forget the past by tending orchids. Absurd as this seems, Ng’s fictional humiliation has its roots in fact as well. Captured Fretilin president Xavier do Amaral worked as a servant for the former Indonesian commander of East Timor for a time.

Occasionally a bit too arch for its own good, The Redundancy of Courage is nonetheless a fine addition to the literature of modern conflict, of those “unknown” Third-World wars where thousands die outside the gaze of television cameras and remain mostly unmourned by editorial writers. In Mo’s Danu, futility and horror walk hand in hand and Adolph Ng, the effete observer, is good company in negotiating the minefield of failed humanity.