Map of the Invisible World [Paperback]

The setting is Indonesia in 1963 and 1964, a time when Sukarno was whipping up fierce nationalist resentment against imperialism: against the British who had just set up Malaysia as an independent state when the Indonesians had hoped for a fusion between their countries, and against their former Dutch rulers and the Dutch who still lived in Indonesia, many of whom were forced to leave. Domestically, too, it is a tense time: there are demonstrations and riots against the government, especially by left-wing students, and the country was on the verge of General Suharto's murderous purge of the Indonesian communists.

The central character of the novel is Adam, a 16 year old Indonesian boy who had been adopted at the age of five from an orphanage by Karl de Willigen, a gentle Dutch artist, and who knows nothing about his parents. He is keenly aware that he is `different' from his Indonesian school fellows. He has a vague memory of an elder brother, Johan, who had also been at the orphanage but had been adopted by someone else, and he wishes he could find him again.

When the book opens, Adam sees soldiers taking Karl away from their home on the island of Nusa Perdo (which I cannot find on any atlas and which may be invented. It seems to be a ferry-ride away from the south coast of Java). Who can help him to find his adopted father? Going through Karl's papers, he finds the address in Jakarta of Margaret Bates, an American professor who had been a friend, and he seeks her out. She has contacts with an Australian journalist and with an American member of the CIA, both of whom she tries to enlist to find and help Karl. She has a young Indonesian assistant called Din who is an ardent nationalist and a ranting, hectoring, insensitive revolutionary, violently against his own government also, and against those of his fellow-communists who believe in non-violence. Adam, a childlike innocent in Jakarta, is drawn into the interplay of all these various interests.

Meanwhile there is also the story of Johan (in which, for some gimmicky reason, the dialogue is set out without quotation marks). When we first meet him, it is only readers who know that some of the words he uses are Malay who will be able to tell that he lives in Malaysia. He has been adopted by a wealthy couple: a corrupt adoptive father and a doting adoptive mother. He is into reckless driving, into tarts and seedy girlie shows, into smoking drugs. But, like Adam, he is haunted by being adopted, by being different (an Indonesian among Malays and Chinese), and he is even more traumatized by the separation from his brother than Adam is. But his part of the book does not really go anywhere.

Novels in English about Indonesia are rare, and Aw brings scenes of Indonesian climate and living conditions to life. The political aspects of the book are interesting and important, but this is also the personal story of two young people who have an insecure sense of their identity, and the older generation also have complex psychological lives.

There are longish flashback passages at tense moments which I found irritating. One such chapter, for instance - about how, years earlier, Margaret had first met the Australian journalist - does not even add anything to the story: I just felt: `so what?' Quite often I found the dialogue artificial. The picture of Din in particular is too hectic to be convincing. Nor can I believe that Margaret never had any idea of what Din was like, that Adam could allow himself to be controlled by him, to be removed by him from Margaret's home, or that he could be so naive (aged 17 now) as to carry out his instructions.

The book is readable, but, in my view, hardly deserves the adjective `mesmerizing' which a review in The Times has bestowed on it.

Most of the characters in Tash Aw's remarkable, if not flawless, second novel are in search of some kind of truth about the past in order to make sense of their present and future. At its heard is the quest of young Adam de Willeg, the adopted Indonesian son of Karl, born Dutch but who has adopted Indonesian nationality in the wake of the country's independence, to find the older brother he can scarcely remember -- Johan was adopted and taken out of the country, leaving Adam behind in an orphanage -- and his desperate effort to locate Karl, who has been frogmarched out of the home they share on a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago by soldiers.

Aw sets his tale in what President Sukarno declares to be "the year of living dangerously", a year in which Sukarno breaks with the West definitively and in which the country trembles on the edge of civil war. And 16-year-old Adam is, indeed, living dangerously as he travels to turbulent Jakarta, the country's capital,n search of a woman he has never met but who seems to mean a lot to Karl, his father: American anthropologist Margaret Bates, who now works at the university. Margaret has her own past history, both with Indonesia -- the country of her birth, if not her citizenship or origins -- and with Karl, and Adam's arrival literally on her doorstep forces her to come to grips with that. Trained as an anthropologist and raised to be emotionally self-contained, Margaret now finds that the skill she most prizes -- her ability to read people and their unspoken thoughts and emotions -- seems to desert her amidst the chaos. Meanwhile, Adam's encounter with Din, Margaret's enigmatic research assistant, may drive him toward another kind of encounter with history.

The narrative bounces between characters: Adam's quest for identity and his family (both birth and adoptive); his brother Johan's quest for some kind of meaning and purpose within the wealthy family who adopted him but left Adam behind; Margaret's struggle with her unexpected instinct to protect young Adam and the realization that what she felt for Karl as a 17-year-old in Bali has never left her. It's a story about quests: for identity, for meaning, for purpose, for family and for connection; there are themes that range from the complexity of parent-child relationships to violence and injustice. But at its heart, the conundrum at the heart of Aw's novel is a venerable one: in times of chaos and "living dangerously", is there still a place for personal ties and relationships? Or do abstractions -- nationality, politics -- take priority? President Sukarno makes clear to Margaret his own views on the matter: "the time for gifts has passed". He is referring to formal gifts between nations and seems unable to envisage something more personal and individual, any more than Din, an embryonic revolutionary, can do. On the other hand, the novel's main characters strive in their different ways to push beyond this utilitarian definition of relationships.

All this makes for a complex and crowded novel, jammed with ideas. But the writing and the characters triumph, transforming what in the hands of a lesser novelist would be a rambling and perhaps even incoherent story not only accessible but fascinating. Aw, Malaysian by birth, has captured the feel of Southeast Asia -- the scents, the sounds, the quality of the light, even the texture of the air -- in a way that few other authors I've read have managed to accomplish, as well as an incredible sense of the time and era in which the book is set: the chaos of the twilight of Sukarno's rule.

Highly recommended. I've rated it 4.5 stars, and rounded up.

The above reviews nicely capture many of the book's strengths and give a good summary of plot. But there is one strength and one weakness, not addressed, that any potential buyer should know. The strength: the writing is not only seamless, but almost musical. If you read some paragraphs aloud you will find that the author has a natural (though subtle) inner rhythm that fits the topic and mood perfectly. Quite an accomplishment. The weakness: the author didn't trust the reader enough to follow through and provide a good ending. The ending is Disneyesque and yells "please let this book be commercial." Pity. The metaphors fall apart at the end because he pulls those punches. Idea: read all but the last 30 pages, devise your own ending, then see what he does with it.