Going it alone
D. J. Taylor
RENEGADE OR HALO2 by Timothy Mo Paddleless Press, £17.99, pp. 478 Normally one tries to concentrate on the book rather than the circumstances of its publication, but the pre-history of Rene- gade or Halo2 — symptomatic of a good many trends in modern publishing deserves a brief detour. Eight years ago Timothy Mo had the English novel if not at his feet, then certainly a convenient stride or two away. Three of his first four novels had made the Booker shortlist. For the fourth, The Redundancy of Courage (1991), Messrs Chatto & Windus had paid a sum so extravagantly foolish that even today its senior staff turn white at the mention of Mo's name.
And then — I was going to write 'inexpli- cably', but what happened was all too expli- cable — it all went wrong. Despite a trail of sacked agents and high-power promo- tional campaigns, no one in literary Lon- don cared to pay the gargantuan advance that Mo wanted for his next novel, where- upon the author signalled his affrontedness by publishing the book (Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, 1995) independently. Time clearly hasn't dulled these resent- ments, and the new one — a huge tome surging unrestrained beyond its 200,000th word — again bears the imprint of some- thing called the Paddleless Press, and a box number address somewhere round the back of the British Museum.
As it turns out, this is a highly appropri- ate location for a novel which, for all its South-East Asian setting, is as Anglified as anchovy toast. Mo has always had a neat eye for multi-metaphor titles. Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, for example, set in the Philippines, gestured simultaneously at the clinically described suction enema per- formed on a local call-girl in the opening chapter, island-wide power failure and, overarchingly, the dung-heap of barbarity and back-handers in which Mo imagines Philippine life to take place. Halo2 (pro- nounced hallow-hallow), on the other hand, is a celebrated filipino recipe whose com- pound of outwardly incompatible ingredi- ents realises a colourful and oddly sustaining dessert.
Certainly Castro Rey, Mo's mountainous hero, does his best to live up to these figu- native prompt-cards. Six feet two and weighing in at a cool 230 pounds, he belongs to an exclusive, and more often than not excluded, racial category — the Amerasian child of an absconding black GI from the local airbase and an obliging local bar-girl. Raised in grinding poverty, with the entire family living off immoral earn- ings, Rey grows up surprisingly sweet- natured, quiet, unflappable, ever ready to right a wrong, while innately contemptuous of the moral vacuum he detects in the soci- ety to whose bottom rung he clings.
What follows, meditative and high- octane by turns, is a kind of South-East Asian bildungsroman: schooling courtesy of the local Jesuits, halcyon days as a basket- ball star, a grisly episode of rape and mur- der involving the frathouse rich boys in which Rey, guilty by association, sees sever- al of his classmates (including his best friend, Danton) murdered aboard the Ukrainian freighter on which they mistak- enly fetch up, before swimming ashore to Hong Kong. There are further interludes spent as houseboy to some incredibly stiff but lovingly observed English expats and as an 'illegal' in a pseudonymous Middle Eastern caliphate.
Increasingly, though, Rey — who, with his level-headedness and his quiet moral force, is just a shade too good to be true takes second place to a theme that doesn't so much underlie the book as stand tri- umphantly athwart its carcass. All Mo's novels, it may be said, take place on a kind of suspension bridge connecting East and West, where the westward sign is marked `civilised values' and the eastward one `moral debasement'. To Mo, ex-president Marcos, at whose excesses the novel throws the occasional fastidious glance, is not a localised aberration but the absolute essence of filipino culture. There are times when this constant exposure of native delinquency, and its inevitable contrast with western straight talk, gets a bit too stage-managed to work as fiction. It's hard to believe, for instance, that black, racially abused Rey would be quite so enamoured of fenced-in Singapore, while the Smith family, with their rigid behavioural codes and peacock upper-class jargon, sometimes look as if they were taken wholesale from the Sloane Ranger Handbook.
Mo's chief merit, in what is a long but Flee! Flee! It's the McDonalds' consistently engrossing book, is his ability to operate on several levels: to create an imaginary but believable world in which bitter analyses of national character march hand in hand with scenes of Stevensonian derring-do and bits of exquisite comic dia- logue. You get the impression that the author (who, according to the jacket, has removed himself to Hong Kong and spends his time travelling in its vicinity) has rather given up on his UK audience. This neglect is a pity. Almost alone among that band of young English novelists who made their names in the early 1980s he continues to produce hugely entertaining and serious novels that look as if they were based on practical experience of the world beyond the window rather than the occasional glance downward from the desk. The gap between this heaving South-East Asian panorama and, say, Martin Amis's laboured US police procedural Night Train is so great as to make the two books barely worth comparing. I commend it to this year's Booker jury as a welcome antidote to the usual shortlisted flotsam of old lags, grey eminences and London-bound fluff.
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