Both of these deaths he manages to get over. I found Pangemanann to be a more interesting narrator than the heroic Minke who (in the earlier novels) marries a beautiful half Dutch, half Javanese woman who dies, then marries a beautiful Chinese revolutionary, who also dies. I prayed for the author to let him come to a moral decision, to give up his work before it was too late - but I knew it wasn’t going to be. Why? Maybe he’s a workaholic, or he knows it can be no other way. He falls into the arms of a prostitute, becomes ill, but still continues with his duties. Pangemanann's internal conflicts pull him apart, he turns to drink and his wife leaves him. However, he justifies his mission to destroy Minke’s work: he wants to get his pension and to continue to provide for his French wife and Indo children. He secretly admires Minke and feels sympathy for the cause of his fellow Indonesians (although this term did not yet exist). Pangemanann, an educated, intelligent man, struggles with his task. Pangemanann gets promoted to be a colonial official in charge of studying and controlling the subversive movements that Minke led and still inspires. He has the job of monitoring Indonesian nationalist Minke’s activities.Īt the end of the third book, Minke gets banished to Ambon in the Maluku Archipelago and exits the scene and so Pangemanann takes over from him as narrator for the fourth book, 'House of Glass'. Pangemanann is a native policeman, working for the Dutch colonial government. This is my favourite novel in this excellent quartet.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |