Repatriated by Adriaan van Dis, trans by David Colmer

A bitter Javanese expat trains his son for conflict, not life in the Netherlands

The boy with whom we identify, in Adriaan van Dis's second novel to be translated into English, knows his father as Mr Java.

The father, living reluctantly with his family on the Netherlands coast, has arrogated his native island to himself: its tropical geography, its history under Dutch colonial rule, its present fate.

His view of this last is unequivocally bitter. He abhors the very name Indonesia, and views as martyrs all who, like himself, endured Japanese occupation but had to flee an unappreciative independent "Indies".

For the Netherlanders are begrudging hosts, patently embarrassed by these former colonialists who now live on welfare but in penury, as Van Dis's autobiographical novel My Father's War also made clear.

Not that you can believe everything Mr Java says. Far from being a member of some glamorous elite, as the uniform he dons might suggest, he was born of promiscuous parents and is of dubious ethnic provenance. He was no officer, merely an NCO with hardships to his credit. Only late do we learn the story behind his now tired marriage: how he encountered a woman of Dutch origin, and her three daughters by a Javanese, in a prison camp waiting to be cleared. Perhaps there was genuine love, as well as relief, in their coming together. Or was it a marriage of convenience all along?

As the boy, the only child of their union, grows up, he sees little but fear of and contempt for his father on the part of his mother and half-sisters. His own attitude is more complex, though scarcely less fraught. To him, Mr Java is a martinet determined to educate him in accordance with increasingly solipsistic notions of what is true and important.

Finding a perverse satisfaction in terrible events – the early years of the Cold War, the H-bomb, Korea, Hungary, Suez – the father must train the boy for the mighty conflict to come. With the boy's relationship to Dutch neighbours or relatives, with his psychic and physical needs, Mr Java is simply not concerned. We leave the boy, bewildered, truculent, on the threshold of puberty.

In form a sequence of 60 well-focused cameos, this novel defies pat responses. Mr Java should be a monster, indeed by most definitions he is. But as we witness his passionate identification with horses, and follow his unswerving fidelity to his private world-view, we refuse him this sobriquet: a tribute to his creator's charity.