Lawrence Osborne’s Hunters in the Dark: a compelling tale of an expat, cut adrift in Asia

A story of identities gained and lost that's reminiscent of the moody and macabre styles of Patricia Highsmith and Daphne du Maurier.

The British author Lawrence Osborne’s novel is about a small-town teacher from Sussex who goes missing.

Halfway through Lawrence Osborne’s Cambodia-set third novel we learn the origins of its title. The phrase, we’re told, refers to those bent on the “ruthless pursuit of happiness”, deriving from medieval Japan where it described the “restless courtiers of the Imperial Court always hunting for their own advantage”. It’s an elegantly atmospheric expression, and one that perfectly sums up Osborne’s cast of characters as they scrabble about in the gloom, searching for the edge that will give them the advantage over the others around them; their one-upmanship never explicitly envisaged as competition but, nevertheless, with every turn of the wheel of fate and fortune, one man’s ruin is another’s victory.

Hunters in the Dark begins with 28-year-old Robert Grieve, a mild-mannered English teacher from Sussex, his life up until now marked by "passivity" and a lack of "surplus", crossing over the border from Thailand to Cambodia. His holiday is nearing its end and he doesn't have much money left, but on a whim he tries his hand at the local casino and Lady Luck, it seems, is smiling on him that night. He leaves with $2,000 in his pocket, the world now spread out beneath his feet offering considerably more than the "doormats and cigarette butts and the plucked fins of cooked fish" from earlier in the evening.

Everything up until this point has seemed like “a period of waiting, or a period of sleep from which he would suddenly wake up armed with a sword”. His windfall doesn’t offer Grieve anything quite so Arthurian, but it does precipitate his immersion in an adventure involving an urbane but menacing American, a rich doctor’s daughter, a corrupt policeman and a poverty-stricken driver. After a late night spent in the company of the American Simon Beauchamp, Grieve wakes the following morning to find himself on a boat en route to Phnom Penh, wearing a suit of Beauchamp’s clothes with a single hundred-dollar bill in his pocket, but otherwise abandoned and relieved of his possessions (his passport and money included). Now truly a “victim of circumstance” – “Secretly, he was thrilled” – the Englishman accepts the cards fate has handed him, slipping into the identity of the other man and making the most of this opportunity to divest himself of his own rather unremarkable life.

The narrative is meticulously plotted, each chance encounter, however fleeting or coincidental, advents a delicate shift in the balance of the building blocks of the narrative – reading the novel is like watching a Rube Goldberg machine in action – but this precision is offset by a sluggishness that pervades the story. Fascinatingly, and a clear testament to Osborne’s considerable storytelling prowess, rather than distract and frustrate the reader, the novel actually becomes ever more compelling as a result. Grieve’s own lethargy of spirit is replicated in the languid, dream-like mood that permeates the text – “One could drift for a long time and not mind and where life was cheap and unhurried it rarely mattered” – adding to the already intoxicating reading experience.

Osborne's first novel, The Forgiven, gleaned comparisons with Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, while his second, The Ballad of a Small Player, saw him described as a modern-day Graham Greene. There are shades of Greene here, too, but they manifest in unexpected ways, in the absences in the text. It's Grieve's life back in England, amidst the Downs of Sussex, and not his happenstance existence in the East that is described as "like a posting on a colonial frontier"; and the fake, imagined past he conjures up for himself as the British Simon Beauchamp that reads like that of a Greene protagonist.

With its emphasis on double identities and double-crossing, it's inevitable that this time Patricia Highsmith will be a point of comparison. It's an apt one, but I was also reminded of Daphne du Maurier's 1957 novel The Scapegoat, the story of another affable Englishman (a lecturer, rather than a teacher, but close enough) on his holidays, who finds himself the pawn in the plot of another's making when he's forced to switch identities with his doppelgänger. In both instances, apathy actually becomes something akin to action as acceptance of the strange fate that's thrown at these protagonists initiates its own chain of subsequent events. There's something strangely comforting in what we're told towards the end of Osborne's narrative: "Karma swirled around all things, lending them destinies over which mere desire had no control. It made one's little calculations irrelevant."

This book is available on Amazon.

Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist based in London.