Reviews

• A curious book, which appears at first to be historical fiction - being an account of the first Rajah of Sarawak. Historical fiction has its use, in giving life, colour, motivation, emotion and incident to the bones of a historical account. But this book goes far beyond its sensible limits, to become almost a libel against the Rajah, who is depicted as obtuse and uncaring. To invent for James Brooke, who had little interest in women, an unfaithful and unhappy wife, a mother dominating him through her memory, and a Malay mistress guiding his government of the people seems to be motivated by a desire to create a feminist version of the history of Sarawak - for which actual records bear no witness. By this device, the story is told principally through the lives and struggles of women. If anything, James Brooke's successes were guided more by his deep friendships and comradeships of the Malay warriors he fought and governed with. The book is written in that "cloudy" style which seems to have become popular lately, in which it is rarely made clear who is speaking or thinking, whether the action is real or imaginary, remembered from the past or still in the future - so that after a while, you cease to follow all the details of the story, and to some extent, cease to care. For all that being said, I read it to the end with fascination and enjoyment. It is full of incident, lore, odd sidelights on the history and people of Sarawak, and a marvellous cast of characters !

• Prompt delivery, minor yellowing of pages but perfectly satisfactory to take to Borneo!

• 3.5 stars. My automatic mental rating while reading this book oscillated wildly. Before the women disembarked in Borneo I was ready to give up on it (2 stars), with the introduction of the female element the story got a lot more complex, personal and interesting (4 stars) but towards the end it dragged on quite a bit (3 stars). Apart from its length, my main problem with this book is the style. Had I known that the author was going to throw a cast of (seemingly) hundreds of characters and a vast number of place names at me I would have made a detailed list from the start. This problem is exacerbated by Ms Godshalk’s annoying insistence on using personal pronouns instead of names and leaving it to the reader to sort things out (e.g. a paragraph starts as follows : “She said she would not, but at the last moment she did. He would look for her, wish to see her…”. (Who is she, who is he and why would she not and then did ?) The whole book seems to be written in a deliberately confusing, round-about, unclear, vague, weird and inscrutable way, another indication of which is the great number of Dyak and Malay words not listed in the hopelessly inadequate glossary. There is no flow; the short chapters (some headed by enigmatic texts) are more like vignettes; paragraphs end abruptly; crucial events are sprung upon the unsuspecting reader and due to the fractured style, the sense of time is lost : seasons come and go, people arrive and leave, babies are born and die and it all seems like a long, long time when actually it isn’t and the female protagonist is still a young woman. On the positive side, the writing is often very beautiful. There are some gorgeous passages, mainly those describing Borneo, its rivers, steaming low-lands, mountains and forests, the lush vegetation, the untold number of animal species, the unbearable heat and humidity below and the fresh crystal clear air above, the sea and the islands. There are also some interesting – mainly Caucasian, mainly female – characters who come to life in the story while the Dyaks, the Malays and the Chinese are not given much personality and remain vague throughout. Apart from greed, lust for power, ruthlessness, cruelty, superstition, loneliness, loss, hate and revenge a lot of space in the book is given over to love in all its expressions : filial and parental, marital and adulterous, soulful, romantic, platonic, passionate, selfish, unselfish, requited, unrequited, licit, illicit, pure, calculating, long-lasting or brief, and those for me were the best parts of the book and the reason why I might one day read it again (with a detailed list). P.S. Some nitpicking : the word “siege” is misspelt 3 times as “seige” and “beseiged”.

• Borneo is somewhat familiar to me, and maybe that's why I didn't have the amount of difficulty that some reviewers here described. They are correct, the glossary is ridiculously inadequate, and it's very hard to keep the characters straight because there are so many (they disappear and then reappear 100 pages later with barely a hint of who they were). But those admitted flaws aside, it's a beautiful and lush book, complex, mysterious, beautiful and frightening -- much like Borneo itself. It's not an easy place to visit, let alone to know. If you have a little knowledge of the history, as I do, I think you will go deep into this book, like the jungle, and succumb to its charms and incantations. If you would first read about the White Rajahs (maybe the Wikipedia article) and the Iban (who used to be called Dyaks), and if you like the idea of pirates and a clash of cultures being woven into a complicated story from the mid-1800s, then I think you will appreciate this novel.

• I'm not sure why I found this book so fascinating, except that it allowed me to enter a world that I might never have known. I didn't like the main character, Barr, or many of the others, except the children, always the children, but that wasn't the point. The juxtaposition of good and evil is beautifully realized as we are slammed from one to the other, feeling the steaming tropical land, seething, forever changing. The author has somehow captured the essence of the duality of man and his prideful attemts to conquer the unconquerable. There were times I wasn't even sure who was speaking, but it didn't matter. Like Barr's European wife, I just followed her lead and drifted through this amazing world. It is a wonderful gift when a writer can offer such a feast to her readers.

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