This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Buru Quartet, of which This Earth of Mankind is the first novel, like the Cairo Trilogy, is about much more than one person’s journey. While the main character of the first three books, Minke, is engaging in a good way and that of the last, Pangemanann, is equally engaging in a very bad way, the quartet is about the much larger picture of Indonesia’s political awakening in the opening decades of the twentieth century. And, like the Cairo Trilogy, I bought the Buru Quartet in an airport bookshop having never heard of it or its author before. Two great finds.
The first two books of the quartet were not written but recited by Pramoedya while in prison and those tales smuggled out by fellow inmates to be transcribed (see the wikipedia entry on this first book for more). That provenance shows: this book, and the quartet as a whole, are not always very consistent. But the inconsistency, while it distracts from the broader achievement, doesn’t diminish it much.
This Earth of Mankind book starts in the late 1890s with Minke, the main character, going on a visit with a school friend, Robert Suurhof. Robert takes Minke along as a chaperone, only to have Minke inadvertently fall for the very same young lady, Annelies, that Robert wishes to court. She is the daughter of the concubine of a dissolute Dutchman, and Minke is the son of a noble and a star student of the prestigious HBS school: a social gulf which is problematic for everyone but the couple.
Their romance forms the foreground of an exploration of Javanese society, social mores and casual colonial injustice. Minke’s Dutch classmates enjoy privileges that he cannot and, for the most part, are quite unaware of that fact. Annelies’ mother, Nyai (the title for a concubine) Ontosoroh, is an extraordinary woman: despite the contempt in which society holds her as a concubine – and the concubine of a Dutchman at that – she runs a successful business and farm, treats her workers a great deal better than the rich Dutch colonists treat theirs, is well-read and is politically aware. That political awareness starts to rub off on Minke, especially when Ontosoroh’s master dies, leaving her exposed to his grasping relatives.
There is much that makes this a powerful book: the evocative descriptions of the countryside and the city of Surabaya; the range of characters from the veteran, Jean, who lost a leg during the Dutch campaign to pacify Aceh and now has a daughter and paints; the de la Croix family who take Minke under their wing; a teacher who does likewise; a Chinese on the run from the dying Ching Dynasty and the scheming Mellema family into which Ontosoroh was sold. There is also Minke at the start of his career as a writer, with the joy and despair, the acceptance and the rejections, that writers know so well.
A great read in its own right, and a piercing insight into the workings of colonial justice, This Earth of Mankind is a book the likes of which I wish I could write.
Child of All Nations by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The second novel of the Buru Quartet, this novel picks up shortly after This Earth of Mankind and sees Minke’s political awakening.
Java at the end of the 19th century very parochial (geographically remote and largely self-sufficient, Indonesia, of which Java is the most populous island, remains that way today), and Minke’s horizons were thus constrained. Although his classmates were Dutch or mixed-blood, the world beyond Surabaya was abstract to him. Himself from the nobility, attending an elite school and largely thinking in and speaking Dutch rather than Javanese, he is also cut off from the reality of Javanese life.
That begins to change as Minke discovers the daily indignities and injustices to which many Javanese were subjected. Java at that time was the world’s main producer of sugar, and the sugar plantations were Dutch-owned and founded on colonial violence. Families who had been on the land for generations were turfed off it on specious and often brazenly illegal grounds, becoming indentured and little better than slaves; the women widely abused (though the abuse was inimical to Javanese society).
This is interwoven with another theme, which is the degeneracy of Javanese culture itself: a very rigid caste system in which those of a lower rank have to kind of wriggle across the floor when approaching those of a higher caste, and to keep their heads bowed and their eyes away from the superior. This is shown through Minke’s own dealings with his aristocratic parents: while his mother is somewhat forgiving, his father expects absolute obedience. I found the language – translated as it is – also interesting: how people refer to themselves and those they address in the third person: Minke refers to himself as “your son…” and his mother as “your mother….” (A feature of several South-East and East Asian languages.)
Minke’s mother-in-law, Ontosoroh, who self-taught, clever and tough. As Minke develops his skills as a journalist, and guided by her, he becomes aware of the efforts by planation workers to resist their oppressors. He visits one plantation and starts to discover the harsh reality of that life. He also has his eyes opened to the struggles of the Philippines in throwing off the Spanish yoke only to don the American one; and of the broader struggles in South Africa – also, at the time, a Dutch colony.
This becomes much more immediate and urgent when his wife’s father and Ontosoroh’s owner (she is a concubine, so owned under law), is murdered. His scheming family, seeing Ontosoroh’s successful business, step in and two battles ensue. The first is the legal battle, not only for the business, but also for Minke’s wife who is regarded as property. The second is the battle for public opinion.
These two battles come to a head, and the author neatly joins the various strands. I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s a cracker.
Footsteps by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The third and probably the most important of the quartet, Footsteps charts the awakening of a political consciousness the protagonist, Minke, and in the Dutch East Indies (as it then was) in the opening years of the twentieth century.
Minke’s first marriage has ended, but he is admitted to medical school in what is now Jakarta. Although he does well academically, he is torn between a course of study that will groom him to be a glorified civil servant, and the rising sense of injustice of colonial rule. He continues to write and his audience broadens; he is even summoned to meet the governor of the Dutch East Indies, with whom he strikes up a certain accord. The director of Minke’s medical school “was among the proudest of my admirers. He had famous student.”
In a previous volume, Minke had encountered a Chinese student, come to Java both to escape from the crumbling Ching empire in China, and to drum up support for the coming Chinese republic. He is murdered by the local Chinese for his politics, but his girlfriend Mei inspires Minke with her dedication to the cause, and by a vision broader than his. He also encounters friendly Dutchmen who make him more critically aware of the degeneration of Javanese culture: how the aristocracy have been bought off by the Dutch, the placidity of the peasantry, the abject subjection of the civil servants.
He starts a newspaper which not only reports on specific cases of injustice, but which gains the help of a sympathetic Dutch lawyer who advises how to seek redress. This paper starts to become commercially successful, and it is at this point that Minke’s studies more or less fall by the wayside. As the paper increases in circulation, he realises that, to resist colonial rule, Indoensian society needs to get organised. Yet contemporaneous Indonesia society is fragmented, bound by a rigid caste system, and riven by vested interests. It turns out that he himself is very good politically, with the political skills needed to forge compromise between the various factions without losing focus.
Inspiring women again play a large role. He marries Mei, and they are happy together, but she dies. A princess, whose parents have been exiled, further inspires him and he falls in love with her. She not only supports but encourages him as the movements he forms take on a life of their own.
At this point, the colonial authorities begin to regard the movements as a danger. The storm clouds gather. Minke’s old schoolmate and adversary Robert Suurhof makes an appearance, now unambiguously a bad person, though a somewhat paper-thin character. A rather odd person, Pangemanann, forces himself on Minke, and is ominously present when an assassination attempt is made. The various organisations Minke forms come under pressure from conservative forces and those of the government, and Minke realises that he will have to go into exile by travelling the world – and thus the climax arrives.
The first two books in the quartet were recited and reconstructed outside prison walls; this one was written. Oddly, the same inconsistencies that plague the first two books remain in this one: threads that get dropped, characters who don’t quite seem the same or who are referred to with different names or titles. However, the big change is the introduction of politics. The first two books had a few overt political passages, and those passages were short. The political passages in this book are long, and I felt at times they could have done with some benevolent trimming. I also felt that the Glossary could have been usefully expanded to map the place names in the book to those in modern Java – I ended up having to look them up: peripheral to the plot, but it did interrupt the flow.
Yet this is a political book and almost a political history. Many of the organisations referred to are real; some exist to this day. As such, the story Pramoedya weaves is masterful: historical fiction at its very best. But the most remarkable achievement of the quartet is yet to come.
House of Glass by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The concluding novel of the Buru Quartet is astonishing. Leaving behind the old protagonist, Minke, the author turns Pangemanann (with two final ns, to ensure that the final n is pronounced by French people) a peripheral character from Footsteps into the central character of this novel.
This is a novel about the corruption of selling out. Pangemanann was educated in La Sourbonne, has a French wife, and starts the novel as the most senior Indonesian policeman in Java (and therefore the Dutch East Indies). Extraordinarily intelligent, he is also no ordinary cop: his brief is to keep an eye on the political situation and brief his superiors on how best to respond. He always operates in the shadows and is not afraid to use extra-judicial means to achieve his masters’ ends. By the same token, as the sole senior Indonesian in government, he is keenly aware of how tenuous his situation is, and of the need to protect himself.
What follows is a fascinating study of human failing. He privately admires many of those he undermines and destroys, yet acts in the full consciousness of his feelings. These deep contradictions take their toll: he descends not into madness, but into depravity. Yet this is no ordinary depravity, but a mirror of the depravity of colonial rule, a triumph of personal greed over conscience. Just as the Dutch as a nation, while all the time trumpeting the virtues of European civilisation, know that their hold in the East Indies is slipping and become ever harsher as it slips from their grasp, so too is Pangemanann destroyed by the contradictions within. It with a ghoulish fascination that we read of his machinations to destroy women and men that he knows to be better than him, that we see him destroy the people who love him, that we see him destroy himself.
The final volume of the Buru Quartet is the one that makes a masterpiece of the whole. Read them.