Recessional

By John Skow

A GENTLE OCCUPATION

by Dirk Bogarde

Knopf; 360 pages; $10.95

The abrupt surrender of Japan in 1945 left British forces holding, unwillingly and uncomfortably, much of what had been the Dutch empire in Southeast Asia. Nationalistic and anticolonial pressures were building among the Asian populations of the islands, and the former Dutch rulers were dead or not yet repatriated from Japanese prison camps. The job of the British was more easily stated than accomplished: to get out, leaving behind an orderly civilian government. Given the realities and the prejudices of the time, this meant a Dutch government. Yet the surviving Dutch resented the British for not crushing the freedom fighters, and the guerrillas lobbed their grenades impartially at any white skin.

So Actor and Memoirist Dirk Bogarde (A Postillion Struck by Lightning, Snakes and Ladders) sketches matters in this remarkably deft and moving first novel. It was a bad time and place to draw garrison duty, as he himself learned when, as a young officer who had fought in Europe with British army intelligence, he was posted to the Dutch East Indies at the war's end.

For the purposes of the novel, Bogarde has invented a large island called Paradise in the Java Sea, and a well-born young captain named Rooke, an actor in civilian life, who is sent there as a replacement. Rooke's first responses to the island are dismay and drunkenness, but duty and friendship draw him into the life of his regiment and the battered port city where it is stationed.

Ironies abound. Neither war nor peace prevails, and although both the military occupation and the colonial system clearly are coming to their ends, only military and colonial rigidities allow life on the island to function at all. The cynical attitudes of otherwise good men come glaringly into view.

Bogarde's hero, Rooke, ages and deepens during the course of a year, and a final irony is that he is so drawn in the end by his military occupation that he considers becoming a professional warrior. The general who dissuades him is one of a dozen or more of Bogarde's characters who are too sharply drawn to be easily forgotten. The writer is a gifted observer, and it will be interesting to see now whether he turns his talents to a novel about acting. -- John Skow

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