Other Places, Other People

Steaming ahead with Map of the Invisible World. The evocation of Jakarta in the year of living dangerously (you know, I never knew that was something Sukarno had said in a speech) is very powerful, and Aw has an even wider range than that - Paris, Bali, Kuala Lumpur - all impressive. But it's the menace of the Indonesian capital in a generally menacing time that lies at the centre of the novel.

I'm reminded of the first and only time I went there, in 1989, if I'm not mistaken. It was difficult to like the place and compounding the difficulty was the odd narrative that had been cooked up with regard to the fall of Sukarno and the attendant rise of Suharto. It simply didn't cohere. The sense that something terrible had taken place in the far-off 1960s was palpable, and it was obvious by omission, as it were, that no one wanted to deal with that anymore. The grotesque grandeur of the various national monuments at the heart of the city didn't help.

In the meantime, it's that old writers' trick: Aw makes you care for his characters so it's not possible to run away from history as I did a couple of decades ago. (I distinctly remember thinking I needed to look in to the period, and I never have, not in any considered manner.) Oddly I've found myself feeling real sympathy for Din, the character who so far has come closest to being the villain of the piece. His well-disguised semi-fanatical hatred of those he regards as the oppressors of his fractured nation is entirely convincing to me. Sympathising with a virtual nutcase on the wrong side of history suggests a number of deficiencies in this reader, of course. Something else to worry about.