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differences between ‘Eastern and Western attitudes towards life, religious feelings and cultural
inheritances’ (Riem, 175).
D’Alpuget has brought her Western readership through a ‘journey of the soul’ which,
Riem says, would normally have been taken by the protagonist. Judith has not gone along, and
‘does not even attempt to understand’, while Western readers, who might, like Judith, still
misjudge ‘Kanan’s calm as cynicism or indifference’, will nevertheless have progressed to a
point where they can understand his point of view. D’Alpuget has ‘unveiled the relativity of
the values we tend to consider as “universal”’, and helps us understand that ‘“conscience”
defines a culture’ (Riem, 177). This explains why Minou’s death and Judith’s rage at Kanan’s
inaction is so unsettling. Western readers are trained from birth to identify with Judith and see
her as right, and yet d’Alpuget makes us feel how shallow and wrong she is.
Those who would jump on Kanan’s bandwagon, however, to drink up his expression of
Eastern wisdom, which d’Alpuget sanctions with a reputation of integrity, have to admit that
he too is compromised. His inability to respond to a public insult might be explained as an
Asian’s way of dealing with loss of face, but his falsifying of exam results to suit the post-
independence system, and his enthusiastic participation at the Thaipusam religious festivities
which he openly disparages, are hardly the actions of a man of who merits unquestioned
attention (McKeogh, 35). ‘Every facet of life in Turtle Beach is flawed’, McKeogh writes, ‘so
the reader ought to be suspicious of everything said or described’ (McKeogh, 36), and perhaps
the reader’s also own instinctive response must be held as dubious, for, McKeogh argues,
Blanche d’Alpuget has adopted the position that an unbiased point of view is
impossible. One must agree. No one is capable of having a point of view
which is totally independent of that person’s culture and background.
Therefore it must be biased. Judgement is up to the reader who must identify,
as far as possible, his or her own bias. (McKeogh, 37)
Let this be writ large, however. The reader must identify his or her own bias not because the
author is dead but because d’Alpuget will not let him shirk this responsibility. The voice she
gives to Judith Wilkes, which immediately gains the sympathy of her Western readers, is
paired with the articulation she gives to characters like Minou and Kanan, who express
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