Brooks captures that diffident English voice, recounting after the event, as if inured to emotion. For instance, the two men recruit a certain Colonel Burmester of Tiverton to teach them ballooning, but he turns out to be blind, and since our heroes have failed to engage him on this fact, he finds it ‘one of the greatest jokes of his lifetime’, and laughs heartily. But the narrator, like the reader, is unmoved. The chapter closes with an assessment of this joke, ‘[w]hich I suppose, all things considered, it might have been’. Later, however, feelings do emerge. With the death of the narrator’s sister, the event is expressed with such tender care and intimacy that the intensity of the experience is searing.

Harrowing as it so often was, this time, this process – she – gave to my life, paradoxically, a kind of deep elemental tenderness and intimacy it had never had in such measure before, and something else – a respect for death, a sense of its real force and place in things – that the War, in all its blind, rushing, tumultuous and explosive horror, had taken away.

Here the limping syntax – for want of a better descriptor – reproduces the effect of coming into knowledge of shared pain and death.

This fiction sails deliberately close to the factual; it is New Albion and Port Morton rather than New Britain and Port Moresby; the Vogel River rather than the Fly. It is easy enough to set fictions in real places, but David Brooks is experimenting with the almost-real, creating the effect of a parallel world, one that is close enough to our own to provoke atmospheric disturbances. Likewise, the relationship between the two men is unresolved, yet it is their bond that drives the plot forwards into a strange colonial space. Their friendship, forged through a stoic – very English – endurance of the horrors of war, survives now as they test themselves and find new ways to live. But they are not the only characters; the book is richly peopled with colonial figures: colonels, missionaries, anthropologists, drunks, Conradian captains and cannibals.

Axel and Edward confabulate the strangest ideas. There is a laughing sickness contracted by a native of New Albion. Fatal, and again, not funny for anyone. Where does it come from? Edward asks his drunken host, the Austrian Gerber. ‘“The natives,” he said with barely disguised disgust, “are ignorant, superstitious imbeciles. They would have no idea where it came from.”’ But a moment later he confesses, ‘They say it comes from eating the winged people.’

This fiction sits strangely with all the post-imperial labour that has been carried out for independence or development, or on Orientalism and other post-colonial intellectual projects. No redemption of that history, or of present regional cultural relations, is attempted, as if British–New Guinea engagements were really something different and more enlightening. Or, having absorbed that history, we might imagine such regional engagements differently, as in Gail Jones’s novels. Rather, The Umbrella Club, imagining how things were then, is more like Heart of Darkness-lite. It ‘floats’ over the darkness and discovers something less horrific and more surreal. One of the balloons is from the sub-continent, brought back by a wealthy administrator in the Raj. The beautiful colours and decorations suggest innocence and precariousness, which is indeed one way of conceiving a way of being in the world, when even to fly in such a thing entails having the courage to submit oneself to the whims of nature.

Novels must necessarily invent ‘ways of being in the world’. Brooks’s vision is less an intense moral scrutiny of immediately identifiable issues, and more a project of imaginatively letting go, suggesting ways of thinking and feeling inventively. Admirers of Brooks’s The House of Balthus (1995) and The Fern Tattoo (2007) will enjoy his new novel.