[The island setting of A Gentle Occupation] is fictional, but the narrative is based on a chaos of facts which Dirk Bogarde clearly remembers from experience. He has assembled a large cast of characters—British, Indian, Dutch, American and mongrel—and deploys them with a structural adroitness and an imaginative range which belies the fact that this is his first novel.

His catalyst is Rooke, an actor by trade, a captain in Intelligence who is happily anticipating repatriation when he is posted to the island as a "surplus replacement"…. [Rooke learns quickly]—and the manner of his education reflects both the precision and the density of the novel—an appreciation of the hidden wounds of war and of its messy aftermath in the ruins of a dying colonialism….

Dirk Bogarde avoids [sentimentality] by tempering his narrative (and there is more than a touch of Greene-land in this seedy...