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The sense of deception becomes urgent as early as Hamilton’s first visit to Billy’s
apartment, where he comes closer to his squire’s array of masks and icons. Billy’s room is ‘a
teeming box of clues’, where a bewildering array of photographs covered almost every inch of
wallspace. Hamilton takes special notice of what appears to be Billy’s strange iconography: a
photograph of Jill Bryant, the Javanese shadow puppets, a crucifix, photographs of the poor of
Jakarta, photocopies of dwarfs, and, like the matching bookend to the Jill Bryant photo, ‘a print
in lurid colours, of an Indian goddess, blue-fleshed, hair dishevelled, dancing on the pale,
prostrate form of a man’ (YLD, 79)—namely, Kali, the goddess of destruction. The deception
is that Billy’s photography is part of the secret dossiers of which Hamilton is supposed to
remain another ignorant subject. Yet, the deception is more complex than that, for it creates, as
Nettlebeck notes, not so much the true story of the people of Jakarta as a looking-glass world
into which the viewer gazes without realising that it mirrors himself (Nettlebeck, 18).
Alongside Hamilton, of course, stands the most deceived of viewers—Billy Kwan himself.
In this room of secrets, these two men of secrets begin to discuss their pasts and
identities. Surprised and touched by Billy’s apparent sincerity, Hamilton forgets his own
reticence to form close bonds to another, and touches Billy on the shoulder. Billy, however,
rejects this attempt to show compassion. Hamilton understands that Billy can not respond, and
that ‘he had touched a being to whom he could not get closer’ (YLD, 84). Marek Haltof takes
the common scholarly view that this inability to unify their spirits is a representation of the
Australian/Asian failure to identify with each other. Haltof writes,
On the one hand, Hamilton is an ‘object of desire’ and worship for Kwan, on
the other, an object of manipulation and creation. As in Gothic novels and
horror films dealing with the relationship between the creator and the
creature/monster (e.g., the Frankensteinian motif) the creature becomes a
source of disappointment for the creator who inevitably cannot completely
control his creation. (Haltof, 52)
This much is certainly correct, and associations with the Australia/Asia relationship are
germane, but the line of reasoning leads in the wrong direction. Haltof sees in Kwan’s
inability to control his creations a helplessness which afflicts his personality and leads to his
‘tragic death’, which would suggest the absurdity that Koch is representing a tragic
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