The price of courage: On Java Road, by Lawrence Osborne, reviewed

Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their backdrops, from Macau to Greece, are often glamorous and exotic. Like any British novelist who deals with morality in foreign places, he gets compared with Graham Greene, but On Java Road, his sixth novel, owes much to Patricia Highsmith too. At its heart is a crime – the disappearance of a young woman in contemporary Hong Kong – but this, as much as anything, is a structural device on which to hang an examination of moral courage. What, Osborne asks, is required to protect democracy when doing so comes with great risk?

Adrian Gyle, the likeable narrator, is a reporter who has slogged his way to mediocrity in Hong Kong (‘I was an excellent nonentity,’ he remarks). Early in the novel, he describes the job of a reporter as ‘transcribing what he sees’ (journalists do something different, he thinks) and, initially at least, it is clear he is interested in surface details. He says things like: ‘Clothes were never trivial to him, as they never are to truly serious people.’

His closest friend is Jimmy Tang, a scion of a wealthy family whose charm and connections have given him a good life and who treats Adrian to parties and nice restaurants. They share a love of Chinese literature, particularly the poetry of Li Bai, but Osborne wants us to see that their friendship isn’t as solid as it seems and that what they value is quite different. Whereas Adrian thinks that ‘words are the most efficient vessel for carrying the seeds of violence’, Jimmy thinks that they ‘came cheaply to most people and so constituted a debased coinage’.