Where did Timothy Mo go? Revisiting the Booker author 'who got away'

Mo is best known today for his second novel, Sour Sweet (1982) which follows a Chinese family in 1960s London. Four years into living in the UK, the Chens have settled ‘long enough to have lost their place in the society from which they had emigrated but not long enough to feel comfortable in the new’. The pragmatic Lily lives with her meek husband Chen, their infant son Man Kee, and her sister Mui. Money is a struggle: Chen earns meagre wages as a waiter in Chinatown. Though Lily, like many first-generation immigrants, has big dreams for her child, and it is for his future that the family pulls together to start their own takeaway, gritting their teeth through back-breaking labour, insolent customers, and an unwelcome tax man. 

The novel is a wry comedy: the food the Chens sold ‘bore no resemblance at all to Chinese culture’ but, to Lily ‘provenly successful: English tastebuds must be degraded as their care of their parents’. Yet an undercurrent of melancholia runs throughout. ‘In the UK, land of promise, Chen was still an interloper,’ Mo writes. Chen feels ‘like a gate-crasher who had stayed too long.’ Meanwhile, Lily drives through Oxford Street on her way to Chinatown in the novel’s stirring conclusion. The department stores speak ‘to her of wealth and elegance that she knew now she would never have’; seeing a glimpse of her reflection, she is shocked by ‘the look of bitterness and self-pity on her face’. 

Upon its release, critics praised Sour Sweet and its deft depiction of London’s Chinatown: the travel agencies, hidden alleyways, fortune tellers, and special banquet rooms in multi-story restaurants. But many assumed Mo to be writing from life, and he himself an emissary representing the British-Chinese. The New Statesman deemed it a ‘brilliantly observed study’, while an interview with Mo in The Times was headlined ‘Making the Chinese Scrutable’. Mo chafed against being labelled a figurehead, or a ‘Chinese writer’, saying, ‘I know nothing about Chinese culture. It is as hard for me to write about things Chinese as it must have been for Paul Scott or for J. G. Farrell to write about India. I’m a Brit,’ and later spoke of feeling the pressure to ‘stay in my box’. 

It’s possibly why Mo’s next novels were such a break from his earlier fare. An Insular Possession (1986) is a historical epic following white Americans in southern China before the first Opium War, combining narrative fiction with (fictional) reportage and letters. Meanwhile, The Redundancy of Courage is a war novel, set in Southeast Asia, that documents brutalities with merciless precision. The move confused some critics – one wrote of Mo swapping ‘quaint ethnic vignettes’ for ‘violent polemic’ – and might also explain why they have not found the same canonical status as Sour Sweet. Though strip away Sour Sweet’s breezy comedy, and one can see the themes that will occupy Mo’s later novels: the creeping allure of violence, the convulsive rise of empires, and that agonising point at which individual agency has no bearing on the dynamism of history.  

Violence does not lurk in the margins of Mo’s third novel, The Redundancy of Courage (1991); it is splashed on every page. A fictionalised retelling of East Timor under Indonesian military occupation in the 1970s, it is written from the perspective of Adolph Ng, a Chinese businessman living on the island of Danu. When Danu’s neighbours – referred to as the malai – invade, he quickly witnesses a massacre on a pier. ‘The shots had smashed the victims down dead, face-first, but they had not fallen in the sea,’ Ng says; ‘after the first few the executions ceased to have the same impact’. The bloodshed doesn’t let up. As Ng is drawn into the FAKOUM independence movement, there are descriptions of tortured prisoners; of bodies convulsing in makeshift medical rooms, and a startlingly brief admission by Ng of preying on the young boys who join the guerrillas.  

Is it torture porn? The Redundancy of Courage is certainly concerned with probing the limits of what humanity can bear: the extent to which the body can be rendered a brute weapon, the mind numbed to atrocity. But alongside these concerns is a deeply human story about Ng and his friends and their hopes, vulnerabilities, and shared moments of grace (many parts of the novel – such as the massacre at the pier – seem partly based on historical testimony.) That none of them meet good fates is almost a given, and there is an especially terrible moment near the end, when Ng meets a FAKOUM minister dispatched to New York. The minister tells Ng it is in New York where the results of the conflict will be determined, and where it also began. Ng first thinks him to be ‘egocentric’ but then ‘he changed my understanding for ever’. The minister tells Ng that the deep-water channel off Danu is key for shuttling nuclear submarines, and thus a valuable asset in the Cold War. The Americans, he continues, ‘didn’t want a left-wing government sitting on the canal-bank’ and thus supported the invasion. Then, ‘he smiled; there was rage and misery in that smile. And I understood at once the implications of what he’d been saying. That was why it all happened.’  

The reader, having emerged from hundreds of pages describing the intimate hell of war, inevitably identifies with this rage and misery. If An Insular Possession considers a historical conflict from above, with developments tracked in newspapers, The Redundancy of Courage takes us into the theatre of action, making no concessions to war’s miseries, leaving the reader with a newly enlivened sense of horror about how games played by the powerful can leave so much devastation in its wake. That I was able to leave the novel with a sense of – brittle, appropriately cynical – hope is testament to the transcendence of its final pages, which captures both the human impulse to brutalise, dominate, and destroy, and also the human imperative to push on in spite of it all, the need to believe in a better future.  

Since then, Mo has self-published three novels: 1995’s Brownout On Breadfruit Boulevard; 1999’s Renegade or Halo2, and 2012’s Pure, all featuring protagonists caught between cultures and civilisations. Britain has been left behind – in an interview with the Guardian in 2000, Mo deemed it ‘antiseptic – a slow, safe, orderly society’. While his fierce independence might make him bristle against calls to revisit his works in the name of a contemporary ideal – of building a British-Chinese canon, or re-interrogating the empire – there was, to me, also an undeniable pleasure in following the stories themselves; on learning what they had to say about being fallible and human, and the brutalities and generosities we are capable of when we are pushed to the brink. The author may have left Britain behind, but his novels, read today, sound out a truth that the nation has long conveniently ignored to its own detriment. That violence, the hybridity of cultures, and the fluidity of national identity was always foundational in the making of Britain, too; denied for too long, the ghosts of history have their way of coming back.