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the Sea Wall, about a young Australian’s ‘discovery of that world just over our fence, which
we then seldom thought about and which lay between us and the northern hemisphere’ (Koch,
1987, 7). This would reappear in The Year of Living Dangerously, where, at twenty-nine, Guy
Hamilton ‘had passed into that border country where middle age is still remote, but where
failure (for the ambitious) can scarcely be afforded’ (YLD, 30). Hamilton has also passed into
a country where the people feel ‘hunger and pain and threat at the edges of their green world’.
It is, Hamilton realises, probably to protect themselves from this alien world that the wayang
kulit exists. He compares the wayang to the comic books of his childhood when he lay in
hospital surrounded by ‘agonised coughing, groans, distant crashes’ of the sick and dying. He
erected ‘them on his chest like screens between himself and the unthinkable landscape beyond
his bed’ (YLD, 202-03).
Billy Kwan understands better than the ever-childish Hamilton the dangers of the
‘Otherworld’, which he closely associates with Vera Chostiakov, the beautiful Russian
embassy employee. Kwan writes in his dossier on Hamilton, ‘I sense the invasion of Durga’s
darkness in you: she who turns time into sleep, and love into lust, and life into death: the Black
One, the dancer in the burial ground’ (YLD, 178). Indeed, a week later, Hamilton acquiesces to
Pete Curtis’ encouragement, and makes a visit to ‘that territory on the city limits ruled by the
lady of many names: the cemetery at Kebayoran’ (YLD, 179). As in the wayang kulit, the
interface between perspectives of reality is symbolised by the source of light, which in Jakarta
is no longer fixed or even rational, especially as one approaches the cemetery. On a moonless
night in a city where electric power was rapidly failing, ‘Hamilton found himself navigating in
an almost total darkness’, the only lights being the irregular, interworldly glow from the
‘meditating windows of bungalows’ (YLD, 180) and the racing ‘Indonesian Army jeeps, their
headlights swinging alarmingly, like searchlights’ (YLD, 181), or like the sacred lantern of the
dalang gone out of control. Strangely, there are two street lights near the cemetery which are
working as though from their own power sources. One illuminates a group of banshees,
Jakarta’s transvestite prostitutes, ‘dressed in elaborate national dress, their high-piled hair
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