Last night, as a counterpoint to all my Indonesian historical reading, I finished Malcolm Bosse's Dalang (or Stranger at the Gate, as the original title ran). It is set in Indonesia in the mid-1960s, and chronicles the ousting of Sukarno, and the subsequent massacres of communists and those associated with them.

I can find very little information about Bosse, which is a pity, because it's an intriguing book. He lived from 1926 to 2002, was married three times, was a PhD and a Fulbright scholar, and lacked confidence in himself -- that's pretty much all I've trawled up.

So, he was 63 when he wrote Dalang... Which accounts, I suppose, for the excruciating sex scenes. (I have this hypothesis that men of a certain age, regardless of previous writing credentials, feel obliged to come up with sex scenes. These are generally not good.)

At the beginning, I almost gave up (after all, at $4 from the second-hand bookshop on Gili Air, I hadn't invested much in reading this book). The opening chapter evokes horrors in Palembang (Bosse didn't like Palembang, apparently) and idylls on Samosir island in Lake Toba, and both depictions are equally orientalist in their perspective. And in addition to the badly executed intimacy, the lead characters (Maggie and Vern) are (at least as a couple) massively unlikeable.

But then you get into the political bit, and it becomes much more interesting.

I guess the plot, at many levels, is very creaky. Seeing these tragic events through the lens of two Westerners and their romantic relationships is always going to be trivializing. Maggie's discovery of Javanese culture, culminating in her self-appointed mission to preserve Borobudur, detracts from what is potentially a much more interesting theme -- the puppet-master's sudden politicization, expressed in the wayang performance that is both his redemption and his death warrant. Likewise, Vern's credulity-stretching rescue of the two children on Bali (this gets such peremptory treatment that you suspect even the author is a bit embarrassed by this bit of plotting) seems like a total distraction from the tragedy that was playing out there.

Bosse researches, however. This means that his cameos -- of expats, for example, drinking at the bar, or waiting in the offices of the vast bureaucratic machinery, or conniving with the legendary corruption -- are convincing. And the atmosphere he creates is memorable. He very plausibly recounts the journey of an inexperienced young communist, as he is slowly sucked into a struggle whose dimensions he could not possibly have foreseen.

Bosse also wisely eschews the happy ending. Vern and Maggie are not reconciled, and we are not left with the impression that either is facing a totally promising future. They each represent an instinct (one for cultural immersion, one for sampling and constant flight) that you speculate might have both existed, uncomfortably, within the author himself.

And in Maggie's musings after her encounter with Mas Slamat, who has betrayed her communist friend -- "There is no point wanting to change things. If she wanted to stay here, she had to learn to live with everything that happened" -- Bosse movingly expresses not only the eternal wisdom of the outsider, but also the survival needs of the insider.

An interesting book, therefore, despite its flaws.