These three works focus on the failed conspiracy that brought Suharto to power in Indonesia in 1965, and the wave of killings (of communists, suspected communists, and anyone who was just in the way) that followed.



1.
Christopher J. Koch, 1978, The Year of Living Dangerously

I'm ambivalent about this book. It's a great read. Koch (apparently pronounced "Kosh") creates interesting, complex characters and evokes atmospheres very effectively. Particularly intriguing is the Chinese-Australian cameraman, Billy Kwan, who is multiply marginalized -- by his small stature, his dual ethnicity, and his artistic and ethical sensibilities (not to mention by his slide into madness). Indonesia's rapidly worsening chaos during the final days of Bung Karno, and the confusion of the coup/counter-coup of September 1965, are thrown into relief by the chaotic and confusing relationships of the expatriates at the centre of the story. No-one really knows who to trust or for how long. It's much easier for them to be divided than united.

But this brings me to the elements I didn't like. At the end of the day, this is a novel about white people. The little band of journos, holed up in the Hotel Indonesia, and the embassy types they come into contact with -- these are the eyes through which we see Indonesia. On the one hand that's inevitable. How can we expect Koch to write like an Indonesian? But the Indonesians turn into cyphers on the way. The politely sneering assistant, who turns out to be a member of the PKI; the slum-woman whose baby dies; the garish crowd of faceless becak drivers and prostitutes -- these are all stereotypes, stand-ins for "dark and mysterious Asia". There are no three-dimensional "ordinary" Indonesians.

The end of the book is very telling. Guy, the story's central figure, now one-eyed, and Jill, his love interest, now pregnant, fly off to Europe. They literally and very obviously travel into the light:

"Bound for Athens, journeying out of Asia into Europe, the KLM 707 drones on and on... following night's shadow on the globe... But dawn and Europe will not seem to come: Asia is a tunnel without end... Out there, at this deepest hour of night, Maha-Kali dances... In a few weeks more she will caper in the paddy fields of Java... No clear tally will be kept, as the killing goes on... In circles of lanterns in the paddy fields at night, the cane-knives will chop and chop at figures tied to trees...

"Light waved in the cabin, like bright gauze... And he had never felt such joy as this dawn brought him. Night's egg had cracked; outside the porthole was the sweet, crystal ether of the north... His good eye burned, and he closed it for a moment. As soon as he did so, a dark shape pedalled and creaked across his middle distance: a betjak, whose rider wore a black shirt, black shorts, and a limp straw hat, and the name of whose machine was Tengah Malam: midnight."

The same framing surfaced in Malcolm Bosse's Stranger at the Gate, the German version of which is called Dalang.

It's the classic seductive but dangerous orientalist trope: they're crazy, we're sane; they're incomprehensible, we're rational; they're darkness, we're light.





2.
Louise Doughty, 2016, Black Water

This book does attempt to transcend that binary.

The central character here is John Harper, alias Nicolaas Den Herder.

His life intersects with Indonesia at several junctures. He was born there, in a Japanese camp that he and his (somewhat feckless but probably severely traumatized) Dutch mother barely survived. He returns in the 1960s, and ends up helping his Dutch security company to help the Americans to help the Suharto government to "deal with the communists". He becomes involved in the resultant killings in a way that constantly haunts him. He returns during the chaos of 1997-98, stuffs up, and is sent to Bali to recover from what is apparently a breakdown. When we meet him, he is convinced that the mistake and the breakdown will, one dark rainy night, be dealt with once and for all by agents of his lords and masters. The ending is ambiguous. We're not sure if the coming of the rain signals the end, as he always thought it would, or the beginning of a better life with his new (and somewhat tedious) love interest.

Reviewers throw around words like "excellent" and "masterful" in their treatment of this novel.

Here's The New York Times, for example: "Louise Doughty's excellent new novel is a character study, a glimpse at midcentury American civil rights, a thriller, a meditation on the effects of foreign policy on individuals, a modern love story and a portrait of Indonesian unrest in the 20th century. And throughout it's an attempt to explain in dramatic terms how someone lacking the zeal of patriotism might choose a life in the detached, pitiless and barely understood profession we call intelligence."

According to that review, the figure of Harper holds it all together.

But it was the sprawling nature of the story that made it less than "excellent" for me.

Yes, I understand that Doughty is asking: "What leads a person to choose the kind of life Harper has led?" But in Harper's case, his path seems over-determined. So much has gone wrong for this guy. As the NYT puts it: "Does a person need so many tragedies to grow into a man who expects to be murdered as penance? Or could any of us end up being a John Harper?"

Again, I found this a slightly uncomfortable representation of Indonesia. Not untrue, but somehow not rounded either.





3.
Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012, The Act of Killing

This one is rather different. It's a movie, first up, and it comes in the form of a docu-drama. It is really hard to watch, and I had been putting off viewing it because I knew that to be the case.

The movie's interviews are contemporary, but the memories they invoke again take us back to the time immediately after Suharto's rise to power. We meet some of those who killed communists (real communists, supposed communists, people that other people wanted to get rid of -- at any rate fellow-Indonesians who were untried and unconvicted). These are real people, not actors. They not only admit what they've done, but talk about it with considerable pride. When invited to express their experiences on film, they come up with a bizarre mixture of horrific reenactment, cosplay, and sentimentality.

The executioner the film spends most time with is Anwar Congo. John Roosa, a researcher who has studied this period extensively, feels Anwar's openness contrasts oddly with "the general silence around the killings". And certainly, Anwar is a showman, with a large helping of vanity. He's very much the star of his own personal drama. But Oppenheimer says Anwar was the 41st boastful executioner he had met, and by no means the last. Tempo, likewise, uncovered plenty of people who were happy to talk about their crimes.

Why? Well, that's the question. Was it because they genuinely believe they were on the right side of history at that moment in time, and genuinely thought (and still think) they were saving their country? Because they know there will never be a reckoning, and there is therefore nothing to hide? Because they want to add some macabre glamour to their lives, while simultaneously boosting the tough-guy image that is still quite lucrative for them? Because the state still actively turns a blind eye to, even encourages, strong-arm tactics when it finds them useful (in the film, even Jusuf Kalla regards the Pemuda Pancasila with avuncular indulgence)? Or is it a mixture of these things?

It's hard to know.

So Anwar remains a bit of a mystery. At the end, he seems to show empathy and regret. Or is that all part of the show, part of the role he has scripted for himself?

For Oppenheimer, Anwar's hope is that "if he can make a beautiful family movie about mass killing then he can somehow put it right and make it okay for himself. He's drawn to the pain, to the most horrifying memories and to re-enacting them, because somehow he's trying to replace the miasmic, shapeless, unspeakable horror that visits him in his nightmares with these contained, concrete scenes. It's like he's trying to build up a cinematic-psychic scar tissue over his wound... Anwar is trying to run away from what he's done, only at the end to realise no matter how much storytelling he's done he'll never be free to shake off the damage that he's done to others and to himself. He'll never be able to replace the horror with the fiction, never bridge the gap between his fictional self and the reality of what he's done."

Throughout, most disconcertingly, we have the layering of fact and fiction. The man who acts the role of a victim later admits that his stepfather was killed one dark night. At first his emotion tries to disguise itself, painfully and unsuccessfully, as nonchalance. But his performance is full of a raw intensity that can only come from something deeply felt. Anwar calls his grandchildren to witness his performance in the role of victim. Real granddad, real past, fake role. The real paramilitary members who take part in the re-enactment of a village burning have to be warned by their leader not to seem too exuberant. The children who act in those same scenes seem fairly sobered by the end.

The movie also paints a pretty depressing picture of everyday life in Indonesia. Not only are the paramilitary pressure groups are alive and well, but we also see the individual preman very clearly in action, shaking down a market trader for a "contribution". (The origin of the word "preman" is "free man", we are endlessly told in the movie, but it's used today to describe someone who is a combination of a thug, a racketeer, and an extortionist). Vote-buying is rampant; political power is blatantly sought with the motive of extorting more efficiently.

As always, it's good to remember that Indonesia is many-sided, and this is just one facet.