With the legacy of the British Empire being all encompassing, it's sometimes easy to forget that there were other European countries building empires and committing atrocities in those countries. This novel explores periods during the Second World War and the post-war period in Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies.
Alan Nolan discovers his father's memoirs about his service during the war and post-war period - and the atrocities he committed. Though his official title was 'interpreter', his role included the interrogation and murder of Indonesian freedom fighters, desirous to throw off Dutch colonial rule after the Japanese were expelled from Indonesia.
The first half of the novel mainly deals with Alan and his siblings, and the physical and psychological abuse they suffered at the hands of their father, an escapee to Holland from the brutal reprisals of the Indonesians against the Dutch and those who fought with them. They lived under their father's reign of terror until the eldest boys were thirteen, at which point all of the siblings were transferred to a children's home for their own safety. When Alan became an adult, he discovered his father's memoirs and, reading them, he started to see how his monster of a father got created.
This novel is blunt, brutal, and unsparing in its unpacking of the post-war period in Indonesia and the legacy it created on a wider level but, most importantly, in the individuals involved. Had Arto, the father, not been part of the service on the side of the Dutch, committing brutal acts, would he have gotten to the point where he was so plagued with his deeds that he became abusive towards his own children? How much of his abuse was from him and how much was because of his clear PTSD, not just from the war and after but from the abuse he himself endured as a child?
This novel is searing and brilliantly written but I would advise that if descriptions of abuse are triggering for you, that you steer clear.
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