In his first novel, A Gentle Occupation, Dirk Bogarde draws on his army experience to throw light on a little-known 'peacetime war' in the Dutch East Indies after the Japanese had surrendered not to the Dutch but to Indonesian 'freedom-fighters'. An Indian Division … is pitchforked into a tricky situation in an unnamed island north of Java. Their mission is to extract the Dutch from prison camps and protect them from the terriorists….

Bogarde was in this campaign … and he succeeds in making the reader come close to experiencing the same sights and smells, the same fear and anger which filled the deceptively bright days and the menacingly dark nights of Dutch refugees and British and Indian soldiers. The plot involves treachery and assassination, a love affair which flourishes and others which are doomed; but A Gentle Occupation is at its best in descriptions of place and studies of...