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As the novel begins, the last survivor, Maruli, is the focus of Sutrisno’s wrath. This
antipathy, dvesa, is one of the five ‘hindrances’, and the cause of Sutrisno’s inability to escape
the ignorance of his crippled ego. In fact, d’Alpuget associates him more with animal images
than anyone else. As a grown man who has managed to slither into all camps of turbulent
Indonesian politics, Sutrisno is described as a snake (MD, 37). His fanatical attendance to the
physical exercise makes him strut with the barrel chest and neck of a bull (MD, 55). Sutrisno
surrounds himself with animal paraphernalia. His house glows at night from the green neon
light of a wall-length fish tank. Its walls are adorned with stuffed wild animals which hang,
fitting d’Alpuget’s theme of human—especially female—brutalisation, among pin-ups of
naked women. Amongst his work-out equipment are ‘monkey bars’, which, except for
d’Alpuget’s animal metaphor, would be more appropriate on a children’s playground. Other
seemingly misplaced items include Sutrisno’s sexual accoutrements, for which he personally
can have no physical use, but which help ingratiate him with such powerful men as the proud,
macho General Sugeng, who visits Sutrisno to work out. These articles also help hide his own
neutering, and help him find out about such men as Thornton, whose ‘gasp of laughter’ at a
male figure with ‘an outsized erect penis’ gives away his homosexuality to Sutrisno long
before it becomes clear to anyone else (MD, 36-37).
In the Asian scheme of things, this devotion to his physical being makes Sutrisno a man
who has chosen the human characteristics which resemble those of an animal (tamas and rajas)
over those of a god (sattva), and he is a character who neither deserves nor gets much
sympathy. D’Alpuget makes it clear that he has led himself down the path of darkness. One of
Sutrisno’s friends, General Djaya, an honourable soldier and Moslem, if also an administrator
in a corrupt regime, sees Sutrisno as a necessary sort of man for the state, but feels ‘distaste for
Sutrisno whose soul was trapped by the lower forces of the material world’ (MD, 118). And
yet, Alex empathises with Sutrisno’s brutalisation, and this shared experience draws the two
together. He narrowly escapes a fully deserved assassination attempt which leaves him
physically wounded, politically embarrassed and economically disabled, but no one, neither
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