[In the following review, Tyrrell provides a succinct account of the satirical quality in Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard.]

Timothy Mo’s first novel, Sour Sweet, a fine satire about a Hong Kong family, introduced us to the rich Poons, lunching on three fried eggs, their amahs sleeping in the kitchen, spittoons in each room, and their every word part of the Chinese politics of status or “face”. Underneath Mo’s wit and compact narration was a telling critique of a claustrophobic Chinese society. It was a world that Mo, born of Cantonese and English parents, would enlarge in successive novels.

The latest brings us to the Philippines, where one called Victoria Init is building a dazzling conference centre, The Dragons. Mrs Init, the wife of a politician, is a provincial Imelda Marcos, formidable and deceptive. This book is not her story—as a character, she has equal weight with five other personalities. But her Dragons Centre is Mo’s way of bringing together an international cast of intellectuals, journalists and criminals, all of whom are attending its inaugural conference.

In his jauntily alert prose, Mo builds a tale less on plot than characterisation. As the Dragons’ conference approaches, we meet most characters at home or en route to the Philippines, then watch them behave with the peculiar codes their nationalities and circumstances bestow. Mo is too intelligent merely to draw laughs from mix-ups between east and west. Instead, we are struck by the radical selfishness in which everyone, Asian and Caucasian, is caught. Mo reveals the liberal Dr Ruth Neumark to be driven by the same instincts as the racist Professor Pfeidwengeler, or the scheming Mrs Init. The satire is relentlessly cynical.

Mo’s intelligence is broad enough to round out his characters. He gives his racist a tolerant side, makes his dumb hoodlum academical in the matter of guns and cars. His limply alliterative title, Brownout On Breadfruit Boulevard, is the poorest pun. A “brownout” is a drop in the electricity supply—not a “blackout”—in the Philippines.

Mo’s vivid language is a sort of Chinese English, as quirky as Salman Rushdie’s Indian English. At times the syntax—“it sent the adrenalin rushing already”—seems like an Englishing of Cantonese idiom.

This novel certainly has its weaknesses, not least its bumpy storyline. But Mo has such a cool satirist’s grasp of how people think, and is so richly comic, that his book transcends its formal raggedness.