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Jakarta’s street lights were growing dimmer and fewer by the month, as
the electric power shortage became acute; in the street they were now passing
through, the lights had failed altogether, and Hamilton found himself
navigating in an almost total darkness, in which only the meditating windows
of bungalows glowed irregularly. There seemed to be no moon (YLD, 180).
Sukarno himself is described as the dalang, or ‘puppet master’ of the Wayang shadow
theatre, who controls the light projected onto the screen, and is therefore the ‘creator’. He is
also variously called Bapak, or ‘father’; the reincarnation of the god Vishnu; and is noted by
Wally O’Sullivan for his long list of titles: Great Leader of the Revolution; Mouthpiece of
the Indonesian People; Main Bearer of the People’s Suffering; Supreme Shepherd of the
Women’s Revolutionary Movement; Father of the Farmers; Great Leader of the Workers;
Supreme Commander of the Mental Revolution; Supreme Leader of the National Association
of Football Clubs; and, so adds O’Sullivan, the Supreme Boy Scout (YLD, 12-3). Sukarno,
however, is most commonly called simply the Bung, which Koch has the narrator translate,
with little care for hiding its archetype, as ‘elder brother’ (YLD, 9).
These echoes of 1984, the bugged hotel rooms, the Newspeak, the ominous
pronouncements of the absolute ruler and their frenzied acceptance by the huge, fanatical
crowds, are far too obvious to be ignored. Yet, they were perhaps too blatantly stereotypical
about a neighbour and region which Australians more than suspect for absurd totalitarian,
expansionist tendencies, and so could threaten to distort the novel’s focus on Australia. Peter
Fitzpatrick—referring specifically to playwrights but of a phenomenon apparent in fiction
writers and poets as well—notes the recent departure from a tradition in which Australian
writers ‘seemed to accept that it was their responsibility to hold the mirror up to a recognisably
local nature, and to present images of Australian-ness, satirized or mythologized or more
usually both’. Instead, they have turned to ‘looking out from the island’ for more
‘international’ subjects and structures, but, though the gaze was turned outward, the purpose
was still to examine Australia and Australians (Fitzpatrick, 35).
Koch’s gaze is directed toward this Asian mirror, but, rather than satisfied with the thin,
echoing surface, it is probing deeper into the other side, noticing how in its reflective essence,
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