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Renegade@@ or Halo2
Book by Mo, Timothy
484 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 1999
About the author
Timothy Mo
12 books68 followersTimothy Peter Mo is an Anglo-Chinese novelist. He is the son of a British mother and a Hong Kong Chinese father. He came to Britain as a 10-year-old.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 16, 2023
It reads as bona fide literary fiction, but bored me. I can both see why a judging panel thought it worthy of the James Tait Black Prize; yet know that I will never wish to open its covers again. Looking back at past winners of the JTBP, I felt exactly the same about John Berger's 'G' (which also won the Booker). To me these books were clever but tedious.
It's Charles Dickens-meets-Bruce Lee, if it was directed by Tarrantino and subtitled by Teletext. Like Dickens, Mo adds comedic twists, tells stories of contemporary (or near-contemporary) poverty and servitude, and clearly likes to weigh his work by the kilo. Dickens gets namechecked several times and also had his fair-share of 500+ page novels. The lead character is a vengance-visiting payback king called Sugar. He's several inches taller than Lee, but similarly likes getting out of tight spots against legions of humanity's worst.
It's the Tarrantino violence I found harder to stomach. Like Dickens, Mo's novels seem to get progressively darker (from the Ishiguro-like 'Monkey King', the poise of 'Sour Sweet' and 'Insular Possesion', to much darker 'Redundancy of Courage '). Chapter 5's frat house scene was especially grim. The final return to Caribbean shafts of sunniness towards the end didn't do enough to ameliorate. Even then, the stale 1990s machismo ('you could smell the pussy juice in the air': p. 480) had me wondering whether to DNF this and have a cuppa watching Antiques Roadshow. You can keep Tarrantino; I'll be watching the Clarice Cliff.
Not that Mo needs to temper the brutal realities of Philippino ghetto life. The scope of ambition is admirable and sweeps through huge swathes of Asia (Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Gulf States, India) along with Ireland, England Cuba and more. This was turbocharged Naipaul, on an orientalist Phillias Fogg journey through his greatest hits. And pretty much his back catalogue, which in Mo's case still includes quality all the way through, but was just a bit too much for me all the same
Oh, but di ba, for a long book the Teletext readings of indigenous patois got tired. There weren't even the gaffes that used to make Teletext worth watching. I noted that even by page 50, I was weary of the tortured use of local idiom.
In the sweepings of incidental learnings, the main thing I'll take away from the 539 pages is that San Miguel is brewed in the Philippines. Also, the Halo of the title (pronounced Hallow) is like Tutti Frutti.
I don't want to undersell what I have already said is a heavyweight book. There is a much bigger story here - about growing up, about relationships, about cultural assimilation, and about looking beyond appearances. Like the title, it was just that Mo could have settled for one word rather than four.
It's Charles Dickens-meets-Bruce Lee, if it was directed by Tarrantino and subtitled by Teletext. Like Dickens, Mo adds comedic twists, tells stories of contemporary (or near-contemporary) poverty and servitude, and clearly likes to weigh his work by the kilo. Dickens gets namechecked several times and also had his fair-share of 500+ page novels. The lead character is a vengance-visiting payback king called Sugar. He's several inches taller than Lee, but similarly likes getting out of tight spots against legions of humanity's worst.
It's the Tarrantino violence I found harder to stomach. Like Dickens, Mo's novels seem to get progressively darker (from the Ishiguro-like 'Monkey King', the poise of 'Sour Sweet' and 'Insular Possesion', to much darker 'Redundancy of Courage '). Chapter 5's frat house scene was especially grim. The final return to Caribbean shafts of sunniness towards the end didn't do enough to ameliorate. Even then, the stale 1990s machismo ('you could smell the pussy juice in the air': p. 480) had me wondering whether to DNF this and have a cuppa watching Antiques Roadshow. You can keep Tarrantino; I'll be watching the Clarice Cliff.
Not that Mo needs to temper the brutal realities of Philippino ghetto life. The scope of ambition is admirable and sweeps through huge swathes of Asia (Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Gulf States, India) along with Ireland, England Cuba and more. This was turbocharged Naipaul, on an orientalist Phillias Fogg journey through his greatest hits. And pretty much his back catalogue, which in Mo's case still includes quality all the way through, but was just a bit too much for me all the same
Oh, but di ba, for a long book the Teletext readings of indigenous patois got tired. There weren't even the gaffes that used to make Teletext worth watching. I noted that even by page 50, I was weary of the tortured use of local idiom.
In the sweepings of incidental learnings, the main thing I'll take away from the 539 pages is that San Miguel is brewed in the Philippines. Also, the Halo of the title (pronounced Hallow) is like Tutti Frutti.
I don't want to undersell what I have already said is a heavyweight book. There is a much bigger story here - about growing up, about relationships, about cultural assimilation, and about looking beyond appearances. Like the title, it was just that Mo could have settled for one word rather than four.
August 30, 2008
I sort of wish I listened to this book on tape, because the characters' voices are so distinct. Like a few of the non-Filipino characters in the book, I nearly found myself adopting some of the typical Visayan turns of phrase that the main characters use.
May 27, 2013
Fascinating story about the adventures of a large, black, highly intelligent boy from the Philippines, the son of a US serviceman and a bar girl. Born in poverty and educated by Jesuit priests, he has to leave the Philippines, and finds himself in various countries doing a variety of jobs.
October 20, 2010
Epic travel of an unusual Fikipino
February 1, 2011
a modern odyssey - fantastic language
July 17, 2018
outstanding
July 26, 2024
This my third Mo novel but could not get through it. Previously I read Sour Sweet and The Redundancy of Courage and thought they were both masterpieces. Renegade was diasppointing to me. I hate to criticise a great author who put so much into this novel but it's overblown and meandering; it needed a ruthless editor to come in and re-shape it. I mean it has a lot of potential and there were passages in the first 150 pages that were great; however, I did not feel motivated to continue beyond that mark. The narrative thread was not strongly enough established. There is way too much hovering over situations. If the text were cut by 200 pages I think it might be a good read. The copyediting in Renegade is meticulous, a good macro edit completely absent. To some extent this is a matter of taste and I appreciate the fact that Mo was trying to do something different here. Renegade is a prize-winning novel. Some people will like it.
April 13, 2015
I despise any author that includes rape and sexual assault at least once every fifty pages only so that the main character can come in as a redemptive white knight. The deluge of racist generalizations didn't tickle me either. I'm not sure if the main character was supposed to be a sociopath or if the writer was incapable of writing emotion. I can see how one could be tricked into thinking that this is good writing because of its parroting of I.Welsh-esque use of dialect, but it's mainly irritating, not illustrative. 0/5, would not recommend.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews