Globalization, an American dictionary informs us, is ‘the removal of barriers between national economies to encourage the flow of goods, services, capital, and labor’. Well, in practice, of course, it means the rich countries of the West exporting and imposing their norms on everyone else, whether through language, legal inequalities, superior marketing nous or the always present threat of violence. This is the great theme of this stupendous novel by the British/Hong Kong writer Timothy Mo, who tells the truth of globalization as seen from the other end, from the bottom, so to speak, by one of Frantz Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth.’

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