Border crossings are a leitmotif in the haunting new novel by Lawrence Osborne, in which characters cross both geographical and emotional boundaries. The protagonist Robert is “a dreamer and a loner”, pushing 30, eager to escape his monotonous life in a “frontier” village in England. He crosses the border from Thailand to Cambodia, swapping his normality for a more nomadic existence, in a novel that explores how to achieve freedom without becoming entirely unmoored.
What defines the course of our lives? The battle between fate and free will is pivotal, as in Osborne’s gambling novel The Ballad of a Small Player. Characters are caught in or out of “the loop of luck” here, too, and Robert plays roulette both literally and metaphorically. A sequence of carefully plotted events leads him to assume a false identity, as even the boundaries between human personalities blur. In a novel teeming with ghosts, demons and spirits, the border between rationalist and supernatural beliefs is powerfully probed too, as Robert explores “the dark of his own mind” – could a bag of money he won really be “haunted”?
There are also moral border crossings here, as characters overstep the mark, journeying into their “heart of darkness”, where greed and self-interest cause them to prey upon each other and themselves. The novel unflinchingly recalls the atrocities of the Pol Pot dictatorship and characters teeter on the line between wanting to care for or kill another human being.
The ugliness of the cruelty of that time contrasts with the beauty of the language and landscape, “the great music of the dusk-lit fields”. The writing is richly sensuous, and this atmospheric novel is filled with scenes that sear themselves into the memory: mountains “burned half-black and the white glare of frangipani”; “massive clouds” have about them a “negative brilliance”. The juxtaposition of dark and light is startlingly vivid. In dazzling, luminous prose, Osborne subverts expectations, so that it’s in the darkest places that we glimpse sudden moments of light.
Peripatetic characters such as Robert wander through the pages of much of Osborne’s fiction, and in them he has found his forte. It’s with expert control of the narrative here that he captures a life adrift.
Hunters in the Dark is published by Hogarth (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £9.74
