Kindle. Koch's breakthrough novel and easily the best I've read by him so far. Famously made into a movie by Peter Weir that I saw about 15 years ago.
As with Highways to a War (1995), Koch expects his readers to be far more familiar with history and culture than is reasonable. This gambit somewhat works by highlighting the memory hole that Australia-Indonesian relations regularly falls into but frustratingly flattens the players and stakes to a colourful backdrop for a pedestrian romance between an Anglo-Australian journalist and an English secretary at the British Embassy. (Once again she's the only available European woman in the whole town.) The elegiac tone emphasises a fondness for the Indonesia of the day that the events do not, but actually it's a fondness just for the comfortable parts of Java and the hills south of it. (Lombok has too much unpleasant poverty.) Some ethnicities are sketched; the Chinese are mercantilist. Islam is mentioned but nothing is made of it. (Booze is omnipresent for instance, and there are no muezzins.) Koch takes it as obvious that they would oppose the communist PKI which left me wondering who'd support the PKI. Bali, Borneo, Papua and Timor (etc.) do not feature. Something's brewing in Việt Nam but that need not concern us here.
The action starts media res. The Indonesian revolution (the expulsion of the Dutch colonialists) is going sour due to increasing poverty, inappropriate spending and a distancing from Western aid. The men of the international press, generally lacking language and culture skills, wait for the big one (presumably the fall of Sukarno) in the Wayang Bar in the Hotel Indonesia. New Chum Hamilton has been sent by the ABS (ABC) to cover the instabilities. We quickly meet Koch's most interesting character, cinematographer Billy Kwan, a dwarf with a Chinese father and Australian mother who has big plans for Hamilton. He symbolises much, not the least humanism and utopianism, and moves mysteriously through Jakarta and the plot. Against him Hamilton and squeeze Jill are woefully bland and underdrawn and it's all downhill from there.
The structure is the same as Highways to a War (1995) but far better executed. There's a masterful and somewhat jarring movement between the first and third person omniscient narration as well as some complex tenses that are very satisfying. Nevertheless it always felt like the more fascinating things lay just beyond Koch's frame.
The heavy emphasis on motif and metaphor is wearing after a while. Again we get the "doubled" concept (c.f. The Doubleman (1985)) but more literally; apparently mirroring Hindu myth, Kwan is the dwarf variant of Hamilton's giant. There's the Left and Right of the Wayang, along Western political lines, but what does that mean to the locals? And for all we learn here the Konfrontasi may've been between man and woman, East and West or some struggle within Jakarta. Hamilton's loss of an eye at the end, a halving or echo of Odin, suggests he has gained something of value (wisdom, love) but we're left guessing at its content and sceptical of its worth. I guess Koch was railing against charismatic dictators who lose sight of the starving masses, and perhaps revolutions in general.
Goodreads: some truly brutal reviews. The threads of intrigue throughout are all so heavily foreshadowed you're always asking when and never what-if. There's a fair bit of unresolved ambiguity about who is screwing who and why. Esoteric. Essentialist. Again it seems probable that a decent history would be superior to these fictional accounts.
