500 Words
From...is a series of guest posts from authors writing about Asia, published by
Asia-based, or Asia-focussed, publishing houses, in which they talk about their
latest books. Here UK-based Tim Hannigan talks about A Brief History of
Indonesia: Sultans, Spices, and Tsunamis: The Incredible Story of Southeast
Asia's Largest Nation, published by Tuttle, a company specialising in books
that build bridges between East and West.
Indonesia is by
far the largest country in Southeast Asia and the fourth most populous in the
world. It is also the world’s largest Muslim majority
nation, a land of incredible diversity and unending paradoxes with a rich
history stretching back thousands of years. A Brief History of Indonesia takes the reader from the Hindu-Buddhist years
in Java, to the arrival of Islam in the Archipelago, to the Second World War,
and then the post war New Order years, right
up to the separation of East Timor from Indonesia at the start of the this century. It is a narrative of kings, traders,
missionaries, soldiers and revolutionaries, featuring stormy sea crossings,
fiery volcanoes, and the occasional tiger!
So: over to Tim…
I was eighteen
years old when I first discovered the genre known as narrative history. It came
in the form of two books: The Gilgit Game, and When Men and Mountains Meet, by
the British author John Keay. They were accounts of 19th-century European
exploration in the great mountain tangle of what is now northern Pakistan. They
were non-fiction, but they were nothing like the history textbooks I
half-remembered from school. They were filled with a sense of place, pace and
character. They were as good as any novel.
Soon I
discovered other writers of narrative history. Peter Hopkirk’s masterpiece, The
Great Game, was a tale on a Tolstoyan scale, grand narrative meets ripping yarn
in the vast spaces of Central Asia. Elsewhere, I found accounts of the Indian
independence struggle by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, by Patrick
French, and by Alex von Tunzelmann. All took the same hard facts, and then made
something new of them. The first was like an airport thriller, complete with hero
and villain; the second found comedy and controversy; and the last was a
veritable bodice-ripper.
My library of
narrative history kept growing: Giles Milton on spice traders and white
slavers; Simon Winchester on a mighty volcano; William Dalrymple on the follies
of the British Raj. I was hooked, and if I had once dreamed of being a
novelist, I now knew that what I really wanted to write was narrative history.
The term
creative non-fiction is one you often hear these days. For many people it mainly
means the genres such as memoir that rest on a first-person narrative. But for
me it is the telling of history in narrative form that offers the greatest chance
to deploy character, tension, pace and the other techniques of fiction in a
purely non-fictional setting. A narrative history writer may want to inform his
readers; he might even want to reveal new findings and make original arguments.
But his first duty is to create a good read – and at times that can be a
serious challenge, as I discovered when I set out to write A Brief History of
Indonesia.
My first book had
tackled two years in the life of a Victorian explorer; my second book dealt
with the five-year British interregnum in Java; but now I was going to try to
cover the entire gamut of Indonesia’s past, from the murky depths of prehistory
to the present day - and to do it in less than 90,000 words - a brief history
has to be brief, after all! Where
previously I could spin chapter-long set-pieces out of individual battles, now
I was faced with a vast array of characters and incidents, all clamouring to
get aboard a very small boat.
As I was
writing, I had to turn away from the heavy source materials from time to time,
and to dip into the wonderful books by the likes of John Keay and Peter Hopkirk
that had first inspired me. It was the only way to keep sight of what narrative
history should be.
I got there in
the end, and I managed to cram in a good few of the clamouring characters and
colourful incidents - from Moroccan globetrotters to philandering presidents,
and from encounters with Hobbit-sized hominids to devastating tsunamis - while
also, I hope, keeping the grand narrative of Indonesian history in focus.
Still, for my
next narrative history book I think I’ll be looking for a subject with a
slightly shorter timescale…
