SHOOTING BALIBO

Tony Maniaty tells two stories simultaneously, one of his experiences reporting the East Timor War of Independence in 1975 and another of his 2008 return to make a movie about combat journalism. By mixing present and past tense from sentence to sentence and combining both stories into a confusing chimera, Maniaty makes his account difficult to follow. Since the author's style doesn't include much character expansion, narrator Humphrey Bower takes over, developing the principals with nuance and inflection. Like the author, Bower is Australian. When appropriate, he switches from his Aussie delivery to other accents of indistinct origins. The language of Timor came with the Portuguese colonists who settled there. Bower anglicizes those numerous names and places, thus knocking one star from his otherwise fun performance. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine [Published: JANUARY 2010]