Islands of the mind

The Harmony Silk Factory, Tash Aw’s beguiling yet tough 2005 debut which won the Costa first novel award, was set mainly in 1940s British Malaya on the brink of Japanese invasion. Whereas that novel evoked Conrad while undercutting expectations of exotica, his second, set in Indonesia and Malaysia in the mid-60s, is more reminiscent of Graham Greene.
Its third-person narrative opens with the 16-year-old Adam helplessly looking on as his adoptive father Karl is seized by soldiers at their remote island home in the eastern Indonesian archipelago. Karl, a Dutch Indonesian artist who pledged himself to the new country after its independence was recognised in 1949, has nurtured Adam, a boy of “neutral Indo-Malay features”, whom he took from an orphanage aged five. Yet this is the summer of 1964, as the army confronts communists and politicians whip up xenophobia, with blanket repatriation of Dutch from the old colonial power, and the bellicose policy of Konfrontasi — a territorial dispute with the newly independent but British-backed Malaysia. The novel is driven partly by Adam’s search for Karl as civil war looms.
The other spur is a psychological quest. Adam’s elder brother was adopted before him, and the separation haunts both their lives, which are narrated in parallel. Johan, now part of a wealthy Malaysian family in Kuala Lumpur but self-destructive with guilt at abandoning his sibling, speeds around the young city in his daddy’s Mercedes, with the sense that “your life is not your own... that your real life is somewhere else.” Yet as Adam slowly recovers memories of his lost brother, the search for his father — though no blood relation — comes to assume greater urgency.
Adam seeks out an American anthropologist, Margaret Bates, whom Karl captivated as a young painter in 30s Bali. Now a university teacher in Jakarta who downs cocktails in the Hotel Java, Margaret hunts for her lost love with the aid of the US embassy official Bill Schneider, and an Australian journalist. As the political crisis worsens, and they run into mobs mouthing anti-American slogans, the search is complicated by communist ferment on campus, a research student, Din, hatching a bomb plot against the president, and Bill’s recruitment of Margaret into his diplomatic efforts, for which she engineers an audience with President Sukarno.
Aw’s prose can be powerful and mesmerising in its sense of place (Jakarta’s alleys are “filled with the aroma of incense and cooking and blocked drains”) and psychological acuity. Adam’s past is “like a splinter embedded deep in his skin”, and when his childhood friend Neng disappears with her family, perhaps returning home after transmigration (the policy of forced displacement to less populated areas), he relives the “bitter numbness” of loss. Less compelling are the limply plotted elements of political thriller and diplomatic intrigue, and an ending that strives for a schematic inclusiveness. Instead of the usual climax of expat heroes escaping, here a newly constituted family, made up of both Asians and Europeans, drives deeper into the archipelago.
Margaret’s portrayal is curiously poised between affection and irony. A self-styled “expert in non-verbal communication”, she misunderstands Din’s reserve as the “respect of hierarchy that (she had noticed) seems to plague all Asians.” She fancies herself good at “spotting what lay behind this Asian mask of inscrutability.” Yet with westerners, “she had not really even been able to understand her parents.” Such ironic stabs at the outworn attitudes of an old Asia hand (“What has become of this country? Why can’t we get anything done any more?”) are almost painstakingly balanced by a troubled self-awareness. Yet it is not the expats but the nouveau riche with connections to the new power elite, such as the student idealist Zubaida — a foil to Din — who can now get things done.
Schooled on history books that began only with the discovery of sea routes from Europe, Din wanted to write a ‘secret history’ of the Indonesian islands east of Bali, a “lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners... a kind of invisible world, almost.” These hints at a more ambitious dimension to the novel might suggest the parallels between familial and national trauma that are subtly evoked in such novels as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, about Somalia, or Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, about Sri Lanka. Yet this aspect of the novel remains intangible, rather like the “huge, watery atlas” of the coral reef. It is rather in the traumatised brothers’ enduring bond, in their relationship with the sea or with their own fragmented memories that the novel is at its most haunting and memorable.