How setting a thriller at the Diego Garcia military base exposes the afterlife of colonial power and the fiction of sovereignty.
Chagos Archipelago | Tom Lutz | Red Hen Press (331 Pages)
Real-World Friction: Why the Timing Matters
This interview with author Tom Lutz ran on Medium in Books Are Our Superpower last October. Before reading this novel, I knew little about the Chagos Archipelago, its history, or what was at stake.
The short version: in the 1960s, Britain expelled the Chagossian people from their Indian Ocean atoll to make way for a U.S. military base at Diego Garcia, one of the most strategically important bases in the world. For decades, the Chagossians fought for the right to return. In May 2025, months before the novel’s publication, it looked like something was finally shifting; the U.K. and Mauritius signed a treaty transferring sovereignty of the islands, with Diego Garcia leased back to the U.K. and U.S. for 99 years.
The timing seemed remarkable then. It looks even more remarkable now. Two months after this interview ran, Trump decided the deal — negotiated under his own first administration — was actually a betrayal of Western civilization.
He called it an “act of great stupidity” and posted “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA!” on Truth Social. Since then: Iran has launched ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, the U.K. has shelved legislation to formalize the handover, and Britain’s prime minister is named in a U.N. crimes-against-humanity complaint over the continued removal of Chagossians from their own islands.
Lutz’s novel turns out to be an uncannily well-chosen setting.
Book Review: Shadows, Sinews, and Sovereignty
Chagos Archipelago is a psychologically layered literary noir set in the shadow world of paramilitary contractors. Four lives collide in the middle of the Indian Ocean: Frank, a drifting sailor with too much cash; Mónica, a Spanish assassin ready to disappear; Alain, a French Foreign Legion deserter from Madagascar; and Skye, an American operative who might be CIA or something murkier.
The thriller mechanics are tight. When Skye leads Alain to Diego Garcia, their personal missions intersect with geopolitics and the story crackles with moral tension and uneasy alliances. If you’ve spent any time with le Carré, you’ll feel it immediately; this is that territory, where the shadow world of mercenaries, contractors, and plausible deniability does the work that governments can’t officially touch.
What truly hooked me was the setting, its history, and the international law angle. I reached out to Lutz via email to find out more.
In Conversation: Tom Lutz
What first drew you to the Chagos Archipelago as a setting? And when did you first learn about the forced removal of the Chagossians and what about that history compelled you to build a novel around it?
When I was in Mauritius a few years ago, I got in touch with Ariel Saramandi, a Mauritian writer who had written for me at Los Angeles Review of Books. (She is also the editor of Bare Life Review, a journal supporting immigrant and refugee literature.) She told me about Diego Garcia and the Chagossians, which I had no knowledge of until then.
At the end of my last novel, Born Slippy, my character Frank is left in the South China Sea with a large sailboat and a few million dollars, and I wanted to pick up his story. I had assumed he would be making his way across the Indian Ocean, and it is one reason I visited La Réunion and Mauritius. Once Ariel told me about the Chagos Archipelago and I did a little more research, I knew it would play a large role in the new novel.
Your novel very deftly engages with international law, colonial treaties and territorial sovereignty. What kind of research did you undertake?
No, I’m afraid I am not a legal scholar at all, and I relied on news reports and web research. I of course couldn’t visit the archipelago itself, since one needs security clearance to do so.
The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on Chagos in 2019 (before your book). How much did actual legal proceedings inform the novel’s framework?
It wasn’t clear, at that point, that the advisory opinion would have any real-world impact. Most people assumed that whatever happened next, the US would never leave Diego Garcia. It is perhaps the country’s most important overseas base of operations. And in fact, even as the rest of the archipelago was returned to Mauritius in May, the lease on Diego Garcia was extended for 99 years.
Since we’re now post-May 2025 treaty: Were you surprised by the UK-Mauritius sovereignty agreement? Does the outcome align with what you anticipated when writing the novel or did reality take a different turn?
I was surprised. Mauritius and the Chagos were linked administratively before Mauritian independence, but they are 1200 miles apart and culturally distinct. And many displaced Chagossians are unhappy with this resolution. Many who lived in Mauritius have since moved to the UK after the agreement was signed.
One of the novel’s strengths is how naturally you weave complex political and legal history into dialogue and action. The passage where Skye thinks about the colonial maneuvering feels effortless. How do you approach integrating dense factual material without it feeling like an info-dump?
Skye was a good student who knows her history, and so I just let her think about the things the way I assume a young, well-educated person in her line of work would think about things.
And Alain is like many people I have met in my travels. Not conventionally educated. That is, no college or university education, but with an understanding of the impact of colonialism and a cosmopolitan sense of global politics, with opinions formed by his own experience of the world. Having joined the Foreign Legion and trained in France, his global understanding is perhaps larger than some of his compatriots, but at the same time similar to them as well.
The history of colonialism structures their social and economic life in inescapable ways. Some of the things Alain says are more or less direct quotes from young people I met in Madagascar, India, Uzbekistan and elsewhere.
Did you struggle with balancing the thriller elements — assassins, mercenaries, shadowy contractors — with the weightier historical and legal injustices? How do you see those two layers working together?
The “shadowy assassin” stuff is perhaps heightened for fictional purposes, but I think a great novel always maintains enough reality to make it useful to its readers. As a kind of thought experiment, for instance, or a way to understand complex social dynamics. And that reality is primarily achieved and presented through characters who feel like real people. Of course, every genre does this slightly differently, and this is in part a comic novel, in the Graham Greene tradition, and so, again, heightened, or exaggerated a bit.
I’m not claiming this is a great novel, but I aspired to write towards excellence. And so once I allowed my characters to think these complex historical and legal issues through, each in their own way, I was able to let them do any explaining that needed to be done.
The novel raises questions about whether international law can truly challenge imperial powers when enforcement mechanisms are weak. Do you see the Chagos situation as exceptional or emblematic of broader issues in how we conceive of sovereignty and justice?
Well, yes, in that the base at Diego Garcia is emblematic of superpower arrogance and extralegality. But some of my characters are parts of a shadow world of militarism and money that are supra-national. These are actors that provide nation states with plausible deniability for some of their actions, and even if they fool nobody, they can still provide legal cover. As we are learning in the US right now, sovereignty does not provide any guarantee of justice….
Your Chagossian characters exist in the margins of the main action, much like the real Chagossians were excluded from decisions about their homeland. Was that narrative choice intentional?
Not exactly, and in fact, I wish I had done more to include their stories. Since they do not live in any of the places where the action happens here, there wasn’t a natural way to bring them in. I hoped that the mention of them here and there, and the very clear way that the power players have absolutely no concern for them whatsoever spoke for itself.
What do you hope readers take away from Chagos Archipelago beyond the thriller experience? Is there a particular conversation or awareness you wanted to spark?
I like thinking that the character of Alain will expand people’s sense of the people of Madagascar, and in general expand their thinking about empire and colonial and postcolonial history. I think Skye’s evolution is interesting in relation to the effects of violence, and Frank’s ruminations about longing.
If you could require policymakers negotiating the Chagos treaty to read one book — fiction or nonfiction — what would it be?
Well, of course, this one!
About Tom Lutz
Tom Lutz is the author of many books on literature and culture, as well as several books of travel writing and two novels. He taught, formerly, at UC Riverside, University of Iowa, CalArts, University of Copenhagen and Stanford. He now lives in the French countryside with his wife, the writer and critic Laurie Winer, and their two expatriate cats.
Fine Print: Thanks to Red Hen Press and Red Hen Press for the ARC.