Richard Lloyd Parry is familiar with the horrors of war, having been the Asia editor of The Times for more than twenty years. In his memoir-cum-dispatch from Indonesia during the last days of President Suharto, In the Time of Madness (2005), he met head-hunters, cannibals and guerrilla armies in the country’s bombed and burning rainforests. He revisits this terrain in his debut novel, In the Green Heart, a jungle caper that quickly descends into political commentary. 

Kit, the novel’s central character, has moved to ‘the Country’ with his wife, Lara, and newborn daughter, Helen. They live in a remote jungle village near the border with the ‘Christian Neighbour’. Lara works for an aid agency; Kit is a stay-at-home dad. Conditions in the village are ‘extreme and fragile … Mothers die in childbirth. Kids die of simple illnesses.’ Kit is a fiercely protective father, often waking up in the middle of the night worried that his daughter is dead. 

The Country has recently elected a new prime minister, Dr Mochtar Mohamad, who sets about redrafting the constitution and nationalising the banks. To ‘the Superpower’ (a far-off state with clear resemblances to the USA), he is a threat, ‘a Muslim – worse than that, a Muslim socialist’, who severs ties