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perfectly alus of the brothers. ‘His body is delicate, his foot stance is narrow, his nose is thin
and sharply pointed; his eyes are almondlike slits, and he looks modestly almost straight at the
ground’ (Brandon, 41). Their far less alus brother Bima, who is half-ogre, is ‘as crudely
powerful and blunt as Ardjuna is delicate and controlled’ (Brandon, 12). At the other end of
the scale is Barandjana, the ogre king, who personifies kasar (course) qualities. His ‘body is
fat and bulging and covered with mats of repulsive hair’, his ‘foot stance is broad and
aggressive’, his ‘nose is bulbous’, his ‘eyes are round, and staring’, and he ‘haughtily looks
straight out’. Alus represents the admired qualities of the inhabitants indigenous to Java who
are descended from the gods; kasar represents the shunned faults of the foreign born (Brandon,
41).
The range of personalities in the wayang (or wajang) kulit can be described as a
continuum from alus to kasar, manifested in the degree of such opposing characteristics as:
small versus large bodied; refined and controlled versus gross and rough movements;
restrained and modest versus active and aggressive. Other markers, as the way the hair is
done, the clothes or the amount of jewellery worn, are also important in identifying where a
character fits into the six broad categories of this continuum (Brandon, 49). There are ‘thirteen
different eye shapes, thirteen nose shapes, and two or three types each of body build, foot
stance, and slant of head’ which can be combined into ‘dozens of identifiable puppet types’ to
make up the ‘several hundred human, god and ogre figures in the wajang cast’ (Brandon, 40-
41).
Classifying Koch’s characters according to a wayang description, then, is not as cut-
and-dry as some critics might like. Koch describes Hamilton as having ‘a “refined”
handsomeness’ (YLD, 11) with ‘sleepy-lidded eyes’ (YLD, 10), and outfits him in a modest and
impeccable ‘well-cut tan suit’ (YLD, 7); His voice is ‘resonant, pleasant, perhaps a little too
bland,’ and ‘almost a BBC news-reader’s’ (YLD, 10); he has a ‘calm, unconscious certainty’
(YLD, 11), making him seem ‘like a sober man joining a drunken party’ (YLD, 7) when he
meets the other journalists of the Wayang Bar; all of which would indicate a very alus
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