Review:Map of the Invisible World

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POSTED: 02 MAY 2009

Tash Aw, Map of the Invisible World

(Fourth Estate; 352pp paperback; $32.99)

Johan and Adam are brothers who, whilst still very young, are abandoned at an orphanage in Indonesia. The trauma of desertion is multiplied when they are adopted separately to families in different countries and circumstances, and the truths of their whereabouts are kept secret from them both.

Just as they tell us in the textbooks, this distressing experience was to affect their lives forever.

Johan carries a permanent guilt, crippling his ability to enjoy the love and good fortune of his adopted family, and plunging him into wayward and risky behaviour. He was chosen first, and he hates his culpable acquiescence. He is tormented by the certainty of the grief that his disappearance would have caused Adam. He fears that it may even have eventuated in Adam’s death, and he frets over his failure to protect his reliant and frail younger brother. Nothing can relieve his anguish.

Adam, too, was grieved ... to the extent that he blocked out the events of his “past life” — his memories and most of his emotions — but he did not die.

Instead he was adopted by a Dutchman, Karl De Willigen, a kind but mysterious figure. In the ensuing years Adam experiences life in a detached kind of way. He is impassive and incurious. He and Karl live on a remote Indonesian Island where they are both outsiders, he by nature as well as ethnicity. As adolescence arrives, so does anger and frustration, and things between Adam and Karl look set for disaster.

But then history intervenes and their lives are uprooted by outside events — the Year of Living Dangerously arrives.

The story moves to Jakarta, and races along with the hunt to find Karl, and the entrance of Margaret — a sharp and slightly bohemian academic. Adam’s close brush with terrorism, the drama of student activism, and encounters with powerful politicians and businessmen in the turbulent days of revolution make for interesting reading.

Tash Aw writes of dramatic and exciting events, but his strength is his ability to create insight and authenticity in the lives of his characters — locals and foreigners — in a country and culture he seems to understand well.

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