SOURCE: “An Insular Occupation,” in Far East Economic Review, Vol. 151, No. 14, May 30, 1991, p. 59.

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...