There’s a marvelous typo towards the end of ON JAVA ROAD, the sleekly satisfying new novel by Lawrence Osborne: “They’ll be hanging like ghosts in your wordrobe filling you with guilt”.
It’s fitting rather than a flaw and one can only surmise it could be deliberate. Being speech it may be legitimate mispronunciation. It is neither commented on nor corrected, but it made me think how appropriate the mistake; if it is a malapropism, it’s a cunning one.
ON JAVA ROAD is draped in sartorial sentences, elegant phrasing, a bespoke style exquisitely fashioned and tailored.
ON JAVA ROAD is the story of ex pat Brit reporter, Adrian Gyle, an old Hong Kong hand and his observations of the pro democracy protests and the Beijing crackdowns.
Against this Year of Living Dangerously scenario, or more actually, among it, is the experiential narrative of a thriller, of conspiracy, complicit deceit, misguided allegiance and a missing woman.
Gyle’s old college pal, Jimmy Tang, is the scion of a wealthy Hong Kong family. Gyle is seduced by his guile and smitten by his latest fling, Rebecca, also from a well heeled Hong Kong family but an active rebel protester, a front row agitator.
His intoxication is heightened when he accompanies the clandestine lovers on a secret sailing spree to a secluded cove.
“Back on the boat we resumed the daylong cocktail hour and lay around in the comatose state necessitated by the sun”. Intoxication, in various forms, is a through line of the book. Booze flows as fluently and fluidly as any F. Scott Fitzgerald fiction.
ON JAVA ROAD is an intoxicating read, the characters and place are enchanting. But then, as Gyle muses about his friends and environs and the events unfolding: “the endless false equivalences, the shifting sands, the curious and obstinate state of self-enchantment. It all depends on what you want to be enchanted by and what you want to be enchanted with.”
ON JAVA ROAD is a profoundly intelligent, introspective novel, questioning the perceptions of narrator and reader. A moment’s obsession, lust, loss, the magic and the tragic presented in beautiful, breathtakingly crafted prose.
Comparison to Graham Greene, Patricia Highsmith and John Banville are unavoidable however Osborne sets his own style and precedents. An adaptation of his earlier novel, THE FORGIVEN, is now playing screens across the country. It’s marvelous. See it. And you’ll need no further encouragement to read ON JAVA ROAD. It’s marvelous. Read it.
ON JAVA ROAD by Lawrence Osborne is published by Hogarth (Penguin Random House).