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gleaming’. The other lights a ‘crowd of some twenty women’, their faces ‘pale triangles in the
sickly light’, dressed in ‘shabby Western garb: cheap cotton frocks, or tight black skirts and
blouses’, their hair hanging on their shoulders. The decadence of the district repulses
Hamilton. He realises that ‘the stately, serene kampong women’ he had imagined he could
find there ‘would for ever remain remote; figures in a bas-relief, and not for sale’ (YLD, 181).
This Orientalist dream deflated, he abandons the evening with Curtis, who angrily gets out of
the car. This is the last time Hamilton sees Curtis, who haunts Hamilton as a man ‘furiously
hunting some sort of destruction’ (YLD, 183). Hamilton too is driven by what Cookie calls a
‘metaphysical’ yearning ‘for that vast, ultimate event which would change everything’ (YLD,
274). Having come so close to following Curtis both into the Kebayoran cemetery and into
Vietnam (and therefore, into another cemetery), Hamilton has displayed the lust which is as
‘intense as an ascetic’s lust for visions’ (YLD, 276), and which Koch will demonstrate in
Highways to a War similarly serves to gain access to the ‘Otherworld’ Buddhists call ‘the other
shore’. That, however, is a topic for chapter 13.
Billy Kwan, like a dalang who is losing control over his shadow-casting lantern,
denounces Hamilton’s desire for visiting the cemetery, and also European culture’s blind
degeneration and Orientalist stereotypes, writing in his dossier: ‘Fool, you fool, from a
continent where ignorance is virtue, where bogies exist only in old, wicked countries
overseas—or in your perverted Fleming thrillers!’ (YLD, 183). Cookie likewise mixes Asian
and European terms to describe Hamilton’s ‘mysterious lust’:
Since his curious dream in the bungalow at Tugu, which continued to echo in
him, he had been tantalised as ignominiously as Kevin Condon by the remote
beauty of Javanese women: those serene figures in tight batik kains and
kebayas, with their Attic shapes, who had cycled by on the road to Tugu’
(YLD, 180).
These are the forms of the Goddess who most attract Hamilton, and who make a return to
Southeast Asia an inevitable event for him in the end. Just as inevitable, however, is the fact
that the screens of comic books, like the screen of the wayang kulit, is but a thin barrier
between two realities which are set to come crashing together. It is in Highways to a War that
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