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suggestions he visit the cemetery he would respond with a virtuous look, ‘I’ve got no desire for
a dose like that madman Curtis’ (YLD, 61).
President Sukarno is the unanimously recognised central player/puppet master who
created ‘a theatre of romantic-revolutionary euphoria’ to spellbind himself no less than his
people (YLD, 8). Identifying Sukarno early on as a god-figure, Wally O’Sullivan admits
facetiously to Billy Kwan,
‘No one realises better than I do that the Bung is a god.’
‘So he is, to the villagers,’ Kwan said. ‘Have you ever seen him arrive into a
village in his white helicopter? To them he’s Vishnu, coming down from
heaven in his magic car.’ (YLD, 12)
Great Wally, as ringleader of the Wayang Bar clique endowed with the honorific duty, invokes
the many names of Sukarno (YLD, 12-13), following tradition of the Bhagavad Gita and The
Reincarnation of Rama as of most heroic literature. Names and titles are affixed to everything
in The Year of Living Dangerously, from characters to places to years, to raise or reduce them
in status, ever reaffirming their importance in the immediate scheme of things, and discretely
veiling their true, changeless nature. Wally’s sarcastic performance, which demeans the
appellations and the man, becomes twisted reality when Sukarno, who in d’Alpuget’s novel
warned Indonesians of becoming ‘monkeys in the dark’, literally reduces the entire population
of Jakarta to a subhuman level by squandering the nation’s wealth and then calling for
konfrontasi to be turned against Indonesians themselves. This is his cataclysmic banting stir,
the ‘absolute change’, a call for adharma to overthrow dharma in order to create a completely
mad world overwhelmed by rajas and tamas, where men behave like animals, devouring each
other and then themselves to satisfy their ravenous hunger. Sukarno, who ceases his god-like
visits to his people in the pasar but continues his own lavish lifestyle, councils his starving
people to solve the severe problem of Jakarta’s rat infestation by eating the rats. Cookie
eventually recognises Sukarno as ‘almost inhuman in his sun-glasses and pitji’, the ‘mask-like
props’ which had earlier invested him with such dignity (YLD, 222). Billy also reluctantly
concludes that Sukarno has forsaken his humanity, and, rather than being the hoped-for avatar
of Vishnu, has allied himself to ‘the beast’ (YLD, 242).
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