Book review: 'Map of the Invisible World' by Tash Aw

By ANNE MORRIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Anne Morris, a member of the National / The Dallas Morning News
s Circle, lives in Austin.
Fresh characters and an exotic setting make Tash Aw's second novel, Map of the Invisible World, engaging reading. Set in Indonesia in 1964 and before, the story involves student protests, jaded expatriates and two young brothers separated as children. Political elements of the story reverberate today.

Aw writes beautifully. His 2005 novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was also set in Indonesia and won two significant prizes for best first novel. Born in Malaysia, Aw lives in London now. This new novel brings his distant, oft-ignored Southeast Asian land fully into focus for Westerners. Read him, and you will never again skip over news stories out of Indonesia and Malaysia.

On the first page, 16-year-old Adam de Willigen watches from hiding as soldiers capture his adoptive father, Karl, and take him away. Adam had been expecting this because Karl is a Dutch artist who looks different from the soldiers, even as he looks different from Adam, born somewhere in the islands.

Adam's subsequent search for his father propels the novel. It brings the teenager into contact with Margaret Bates, an anthropologist and Karl's former lover. A longtime Jakarta resident, Margaret has ties to Indonesia's past and is linked through her university students and her research assistant, Din, to the turmoil that marks the city. She is a particularly well-drawn character, with endearing self-confidence. She so prides herself on being able to read people that when she cannot, the results prove nearly catastrophic.

Besides searching for his father, Adam longs to know what happened to his older brother, Johan, who was adopted out of the orphanage earlier. Some alternate third-person chapters are told from Johan's point of view. Adopted by a wealthy family in Malaysia, he continues to feel guilt about their separation and appears as a rebellious risk-taker. His part of the plot is never fully resolved.

The grand-sounding title of the novel comes from Din's unfinished research project: a secret history of the Indonesian Islands from Bali eastward. "To me," Din tells Margaret, "those islands were like a lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners – a kind of invisible world, almost." The question of what role foreigners can have in a place like this, post-colonialism, is raised in the book, but does not dominate it. The Map of the Invisible World appears to be more about lost souls seeking, and perhaps finding, family amid the troubled landscape.

Aw succeeds particularly well when he enters the minds of his stronger characters, Adam and Margaret, to show their complicated feelings. They are never mere types, though they easily could have been.

Aw's depictions of violence are also especially good. Readers feel tangible fear as rioters climb over a car Westerners are riding in, or when Margaret walks into the wrong part of town and is taunted by aggressive street boys.

What hope this novel holds out for such a troubled part of the world is tentative, as uncertain as Adam's future happiness. This novel almost cries out for a sequel.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.

Source:dallasnews.com/