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girl—stank’, another jibe at Australians who ‘go troppo’, but she finds even that preferable ‘to
the nauseatingly sweet incense down by the river—and the fruit abandoned to be trampled
under foot, and the music and screams which had shuddered through her.’ And so Judith
Wilkes, a woman who has come to exploit Asia for her career and sex life, dismisses Asia as a
land of degenerate barbarity. She invokes her own Greek-based culture for the coup de grace,
thinking: ‘Everything in excess for these people’ (TB, 152). It is an ironic finale when one
considers that the ancient Greeks were somehow cousins to the Aryans who introduced the
Vedic culture to India, and also that Judith has managed to avoid learning anything from her
intense experiences in Malaysia. The goal of attaining ‘at-one-ment’, of forgiving herself for
her own sins and accepting a sense of the ‘doubt’ about herself in developing the ‘faith’ she so
desperately needs, is first described to her by a Catholic priest, and she treats this message with
the same stereotypical derision within her in-group that she gives its Asian parallel (TB, 54).
In the end, she confirms Minou’s analysis of her lack of a sense of purpose by retreating back
into her consumerist shell, more concerned with her duty-free bargains than with her spiritual
renaissance (Maack, 129).
Turtle Beach is an essentially Western novel about Westerners whose social
predilections are shaken by contact with the ‘Asian Other’. Even the principle Asian
characters, Kanan and Minou, though maintaining a underlying respect for their roots, are
destabilised by their deep Westernisation. Kanan comes off as an intellectual who knows all
about Indian philosophy, but participates more as an ‘art lover’ than a ‘true believer’. Minou is
a quintessential lost child, a ‘hybrid’ who has never fit in. She is almost more Western than the
Westerners, though her inability to find a home for herself leads to her very Eastern self-
sacrifice which Westerners can only see as self-destruction. Judith Wilkes is something of
each of these two. As a journalist and Western woman she is interested in the Indian culture
and in the problems of the Asians, but she steadfastly maintains her distance. This, Koh Tai
Ann complains, is borne of the Australian attitude of being very secure in its views about
Asian countries and people, never failing an interpretation of events and conditions there,
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