ON JAVA ROAD

An atmospheric thriller set in a Hong Kong convulsed by student protests and China’s heavy-handed response to them circa 2019.

Adrian Gyle is a veteran British reporter, a 20-year resident of Hong Kong who has access to the city's elites thanks to the charming, reckless Jimmy Tang, his old university friend. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a young woman Adrian meets through Jimmy; she’s both a child of wealth and influence and a fearless frontline street protester (her legs bear splotches from the blue dye authorities fire from water cannons to disperse and identify activists). But to call this a mystery may mislead a bit. The book is like a whodunit turned inside out, with what might usually be background—the precisely and evocatively drawn setting, especially—at center and the plot mostly crowding in around the edges. Hong Kong comes fiercely alive on the page, and Osborne’s command of complex history, geography, and politics (and poetry) is nuanced and sure-handed. He captures, too, Gyle’s feeling of wistful alienhood, the jadedness that approaches but never quite gets to cynicism. Some of the detail—especially about fashion, food, and drink—does pall a bit, but Osborne’s strategy is mostly successful: The reader senses early on that the disappearance, like the larger mystery it’s embedded in, the case of Hong Kong’s fate, won’t—can’t—have a simple solution. Decisive conclusions, it seems implied, require an arrogance like that Tacitus referred to (Osborne quotes it here) when he wrote about invaders who “make a desert and call it peace.” Solutions belong only to those who can ruthlessly enforce them, and the reader—like the battered-from-all-sides Gyle and like the ordinary residents of Hong Kong—can have no illusions about that.

Moody and compelling.