Tash Aw travels to the heart of Sukarno’s Indonesia
Sometimes i imagine I’ll end up like Joseph Conrad’s Almayer in some obscure place living a sad lifestyle, although there’s something pure about living within your memories,” says Tash Aw, on which fictional character resembles him the most in an interview to The Independent earlier this month. He is little talked about in these parts, but is the first Malaysian to write a major novel in English in our times. That novel is The Harmony Silk Factory, with which Aw debuted in 2005 and that went on to make the Man Booker Prize longlist, win a Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award (Costa Award).

Memory maps an invisible world, or is itself that invisible world, wherein the play of darkness and light conceals more than reveals, or when it reveals, it reveals slowly, obliquely, somewhat like a novel’s plot. Memory mixes with desire and produces the arch literary metaphor of the quest. For Aw, a self-confessed pilgrim on Conrad’s journey into darkness, that quest drives his two published novels. In the first one, the journey is into the truth about Johnny Lim — a pauper who becomes a rich industrialist, having once been a communist agent and a Japanese collaborator during World War II, and whose story is variably told from three perspectives — as well as a journey into Malaysia around the middle of the 20th century. In Map of the Invisible World, 16-year-old Adam sets out on a quest to find Karl, the Dutch artist who adopted him and whose arrest by Indonesian soldiers begins the narrative against the backdrop of Sukarno’s 1960s drive to deport the Dutch en masse just as Indonesia’s political volcano erupted.

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