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Each of the five novels in this study, nevertheless, occurs at a moment distinguished by a
disastrous change in this cosmic fortune. Monkeys in the Dark concludes with a series of
victories for Sinclaire which d’Alpuget foreshadows with a clear image showing that the turn
of the wheel of time has turned down for Alex as for the whole city, writing that ‘a cloud like a
grey goblin was rearing’ over Djakarta ‘with dark, thickened limbs’ (MD, 162), leaving the
mosquito-filled air so ‘feverish and sticky’ that even the native plants were dying ‘under the
glaring metal sky’ (MD, 164).
It is time for Sinclaire to plan his final assault on Alex. Failure, he muses
disingenuously, would fritter away his ‘ability for affection’. ‘He would be clever and
heartless and whoever he married would become heartless, too, in order to survive with him’.
She would spend money on clothes, the opera, and on ‘fashionable young painters who took
drugs and who would sleep with her while he was at board meetings’. Sinclaire recognises that
he is vulnerable to this ‘sort of fate’, and yearns for Alex as his only way out. Other women
were more glamorous or intelligent, but were empty-headed or tasteless; Alex had ‘a lovely,
haughty turn of the head’, was compassionate, and had ‘a sort of wisdom in her, an intuition to
love’. In what is certainly the most telling definition of the differences of perspective between
Alex and Sinclaire, he thinks ‘she would do the good thing, not the right thing’—knowing that
he would do just the opposite. Sinclaire can justify treating Alex like a ‘sedulously-recruited
agent’ to win her love, yet also knows that ‘he yearns for her because she was his, his own, his
kind—and yet, she was better, more worth having’ than he (MD, 164-65).
Sinclaire brings Alex to buy durians for the imprisoned Maruli, but insists that she eat
some herself as ‘a sign of going troppo’—a symbolic weakening of her exterior bonds—in the
local market frequented by the city’s richest, but where the distinctions between the working
men and animals have broken down. The sight of ‘the cartmen with their dumb, crushed faces
and their magnificently-muscled bodied’ further distress Alex’s tendency to sattva and good.
The sellers promise that the durian are aphrodisiacs and induce pregnancy, and, indeed, their
‘putrefying odour’ causes Alex to retch. As she gags, someone calls her ‘an Albino’,
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