Customer Reviews

The Redundancy of Courage

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It is the best I have read. The title is the theme: individual courage in any 20th century national poltical struggle is redundant, irrelevant to the outcome of that struggle. I saw the same thing - on both sides of the conflict- living in Chile during and after the Allende government. Mo's narrator saw it in East Timor after the Indonesian invasion. It is simply brilliant: a War and Peace for the "Third World" and this century. Since I first read it in the year of publication the only thing I can wonder is: why does Timothy Mo not write more? I've read all of his books and I would read many more.

I have recently re-read this book during a trip to Dili, where I was fortunate enough to meet some of the resistance leaders who feature in "Redundancy" (If Timothy Mo reads this, I would enjoy seeing if my identification of the 'fictional' characters is correct!). This is a shocking story of devastation and brutality on a massive scale, ignored and even aided and abetted by the major Western powers for 25 years. Mo himself seems torn between the cynicism and self-interest of his narrator, self-described as "The Cynical Chinaman", and his own admiration for the FALINTIL guerrillas and the legitimacy of their struggle. Thus on the one hand we have the fictitious account of FAK(sic)INTIL's post-invasion decapitation of the IP (UDT)leaders (Nicolau Lobato, apparently the model for Osvaldo, certainly undertook no such action), on the other we have the final page of the book, a moving and entirely uncynical tribute to 'ordinary people asked extraordinary things in terrible circumsatnces - and delivering'. One could question Mo's judgement in attributing fictitious deeds to identifiable characters in what is really a history book. That, however, in no way detracts from the power of this extremely important work. All of Mo's books seem initially to offer a detached and amused account of aspects of Asian life, whether in Asia or elsewhere, but ultimately surprise and move the reader with compassionate and heartfelt conclusions. "Redundancy" is however different in that it seeks to and succeeds in demonstrating, through these true events, the power and triumph of the human spirit in the face of seemingly impossible odds. "Nothing can stop the march of a people seeking their freedom. Nothing and no one". Osvaldo was right, Adolph Ng was wrong, and the world is a richer and better place for it. This book should not be out of print. It should be compulsory reading for the men and women serving with UNTAET in East Timor today. It should act as a reminder to politicians around the world, that the conscious ignoring of and appeasement of aggression by one people against another diminishes us all.

An amazing fictionalised account of the East Timor invasion by the Indonesians in the 1970s. A Chinese caught between the crossfire of the invaders and the resistance while keenly obsverving the hyprocracy and sadness of both sides. The black humour comes with revealation of the selfish survival instinct of the individual. Some of the combat descriptions are just so uncomfortably real and shocking. The way the last quarter of the book describes the Indonesians makes me real worried whenever I visit Jakarta. I still do not know how T. Mo managed to gather all the background information and describe them with such poise and crisp.

No book by Timothy Mo is quite like any other, but they are all brilliant. Sour Sweet and The Monkey King diagnose family dysfunction in London and Hong Kong respectively; An Insular Possession is an exquisite satire on the relationship between journalism and imperialism, and Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard deftly extends the farce to academe.

But "Redundancy" is Mo's masterpiece, a blackly ironic dramatisation of the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia in 1975. The theme is complicity, and the inexorable fate through which Mo's gay, Chinese outsider-narrator becomes implicated in the crimes of *all* his oppressors, will break your heart.

I can't praise this book highly enough. I date my adult life from the day I read it.

Timothy Mo's novels have not always appealed to me (especially 'The Insular Possession') but I found this book depressingly capivating. I would unhesitatingly recommend it and have done so to numerous friends over the years. By the way, Timothy Mo's 'Sour Sweet' is also a good read, and especially so for those familiar with both Hong Kong and the U.K.

I have no quarrel with the author's position on the invasion and occupation on East Timor. With their racism and territorial aggression, I've always considered the Indonesians, or more precisely their Javan elite, to be the Nazis of South East Asia. But I do have several problems with this novel.
In the first place, Mo "tells" rather than "shows". For example, in the crucial scene in the cafe when Adolph, the narrator, meets Oliveira and many of the main characters for the first time, he summarises the conversation for us instead of letting the characters speak for themselves by reporting their remarks verbatim. The result is that, at precisely the moment when the characters should lodge firmly in the reader's imagination, they fail to step off the page.
In the second place, Adolph's voice smothers the action. In the opening chapter, for example, when the malais land and begin their massacre, we get a great deal of what Adolph thought and felt, but little hard detail of the action and the scene -- and it is hard detail that makes action and scene come alive for the reader. We need more of the behaviour of the malais and their victims, more of the sounds and smells, the heat and humidity, the telling visual details of the scene; and much less of Adolph's ruminations.
Thirdly, Mo is irritatingly coy about his subject. To never refer to the nationality of the invaders and never name the colonial power is contrived and ultimately tedious. Either thoroughly ficitionalise the story or use the real names.
Finally, there were a number of "continuity" lapses which a competent editor, not to mention an attentive author reading his proofs, should have picked up.
Altogether, while the novel's heart is in the right place and the question it poses -- is courage of any use in a modern conflict? -- is thought-provoking, it's technical flaws make it too exasperating to be really involving.
PS to the reviewer who thought it one of the greatest novel's of the twentieth century: what are you thinking?! What about such novels as Conrad's Nostromo and The Secret Agent, Greene's The Power And The Glory, Orwell's 1984, Vidal's Lincoln. By what measure does this novel stand in that company? And that's just restricting myself to political novels.