On Java Road by Lawrence Osborne (Penguin Random House UK)

Adrian Gyle hovers perilously on the edge of the old acronym, FILTH, Failed in London, Try Hong Kong, but in his case this is reversed. Although he’s lived and worked in Hong Kong since The Handover, he’s still known only as “a writer of something or other,” a self-described “excellent nonentity.” What has kept him afloat in his adopted city--and what’s kept him from returning to London as a failure-- is a bit of luck, a friendship from his university days with the son of a Hong Kong billionaire, a frivolous but loyal comrade. 

Jimmy Tang sees himself as a kind of Pygmalion, buying his old college chum the suits that will distinguish him from other journalist hacks, taking him to Hong Kong’s best restaurants, inviting him to parties where Gyle meets “useful friends.” But Hong Kong has changed over the past decades. “The disturbances”  have erupted and the divisions they have caused are jagged ones. Students, police, and Triad thugs battle it out on the streets while families like Jimmy’s, “servants of stability,” stay aloof, worrying that the revolutionaries will “spoil their paradise.”

Gyle is emotionally detached from the battles that he witnesses until he meets Jimmy’s latest girl. Rebecca To is beautiful, articulate, 23, and a rebel. From a family so closely linked to Jimmy’s own that the two of them are committing “social incest,” she comes to dinner bearing the scent of tear gas. 

Gyle, after three meetings, becomes infatuated with his friend’s girl and when she mysteriously disappears soon after she and Jimmy have broken up, he is haunted by Rebecca. Is she one of the many bodies who have shown up in Victoria Harbor? Could Jimmy’s visit to a morgue, one where a drowned girl has recently arrived, be a sign that this dead girl might be Rebecca? And who has sent an anonymous email to Gyle with details of Rebecca’s final days and of the way she died, an email that implies that Jimmy was complicit in her death?

The real mystery of On Java Road is the book itself. Is it a thriller or a tale of the supernatural? Is it an adventure steeped in class differences and political change or just a lengthy description of Hong Kong that’s been cloaked with an overlay of fiction? 

There’s a fine line between detachment and complete disinterest that Lawrence Osborne’s novel flirts with. He gives more details about the sartorial and gustatorial habits of Hong Kong’s plutocrats than he does about the revolution that’s tearing the city apart. When conversations between his characters threaten to illuminate local politics, he removes all quotation marks and gives a brief and superficial summary of reported speech. The book is rich with Gyle’s interior thoughts and observations while every other character exists in a shadow land, amorphous and allowed only brief moments of animation.

Much praised for his sense of place, Osborne excels in his evocative portrait of Hong Kong, a city that he clearly loves. His observations of its neighborhoods are vivid enough to make readers want to get on the next plane and see this beauty for themselves. Unfortunately it also gives rise to the feeling that On Java Road is a collection of lovely pieces written for a glossy travel magazine that have been grafted onto a slender novella. Although Osborne has often been compared to Graham Greene, this work is more reminiscent of the kind of short story written by W. Somerset Maugham. Appropriately enough for the season, this is a ghost story--and the ghost of a novel that never really comes to life.~Janet Brown