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Jakarta Post

John Leake: New novel binds Bali and Aceh

JP/Trisha S

Trisha Sertori (The Jakarta Post)
Ubud
Thu, April 30, 2009

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John Leake: New novel binds Bali and Aceh

JP/Trisha S.

Citizens of Vienna sleep snug under the blanket-warm weight of nostalgia; their dreams woven from the tarnished-gilt threads of grandeur.

Author of The New York Times listed biography Entering Hades, sandy haired Texan John Leake, found himself breathing in that city's atrophied atmosphere almost a decade ago and was spellbound by its melancholy.

Entering Hades is the true story of serial killer, Jack Unterweger, known also as "The Vienna Woods Killer". The book has been optioned by Warner Brothers and John Malkovich is currently playing the lead in the operatic adaptation. Coming off the back of the book's success, Leake is now in Indonesia, researching for his next work.

The stocky neighbor of Texan oil men, who was born and raised in Dallas, is, at first glance, a surprising character to have had immersed himself in old Europe.

However, his mental muscle power, honed with a bachelor's degree in history and a masters in philosophy, makes his discussion potent with societal insight.

Vienna is "an Imperial ghost town", Leake says of the city he has called home for the past decade. It was home also to author and society darling Jack Unterweger, who in the early 1990's strangled women with their own bras across two continents - and reported on the murders as a freelance journalist.

Of the background to writing Entering Hades, Leake says it was the sighing dreams dwelling on Imperial Austria, an early Vatican state and a rare win in the Napoleonic wars; a society's memories of Emperor Franz Joseph who built a renaissance city of music, art, horse mastership and science.

Disturbed from their slumber, these calm citizens of Vienna slid into the turgid surf of a world war that turned their empire to ash. History tells us little is left of that former greatness, bar the horses and the city's echoing halls of power, Leake explains of the city today.

"I wanted to write a book with this city of loss as the backdrop. I was deeply inspired by Graham Greene's The Third Man, also set in Vienna," says Leake. "To be honest, I was not that interested in the criminal genre - certainly not in the serial killer," says Leake.

It was Vienna's sighing nostalgia, today wheezing with tired chords of Johann Strauss' 300 year old tunes, which offered Leake the perfect backdrop for his book. But it was not until he was sipping coffee over a newspaper in a Vienna coffee house that he came across the Jack Unterweger story that was so much stranger than fiction: In Unterweger, Leake had uncovered a city's deepest fears made flesh from nightmare.

Leake's next book plies the water world between Bali and Aceh. The provinces make up two of archipelagic Indonesia's most extreme psychological and physical points. This, his first novel, is at its earliest beginnings.

Leake is currently researching the novel that will examine the anguish and exploitation of disaster; the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia; the grief and gold engendered during the earth's innocent wanderings, which killed more than 240,000 people in Indonesia alone.

"The initial idea came with the cataclysm that was the tsunami. I was on the island of Maui on 26 December, 2004 when the reports of the tsunami came through. It was unfathomable to me that an entire city, Banda Aceh, could be hit by a wave and disappear - that *image* never left me," says Leake of his introduction to Indonesia as the backdrop for a novel.

Like an articulate echidna, Leake's hair stands on end, as he discusses the sudden absence that was, a moment before, a city. His hope with his current work in progress is to tell some of the human elements of this twist in the earth's surface that wiped out communities in their thousands and breached the walls of a guerilla war.

"At that time Banda Aceh was kind of closed to foreigners. They didn't want people hanging around - you couldn't get visa's issued - so you have this closed region hit by disaster and it is forced open," says Leake of the armada of aid ships and workers that arrived from all over the world in the weeks following the tsunami. Aid in a time of need that splintered the bamboo curtain of this forbidden territory and opened doors to both humanitarians and exploiters of disaster alike.

In his research, Leake chats to everyone he comes across. Strolling the streets of Ubud, Bali, before heading into the potentially "harrowing Aceh", Leake chats with a local musician, promising to see his show that night - and did. A young English girl heavily into health foods is taken to lunch and listened to, a young American tells her all. Leake listens like a bower bird collecting gold chocolate bar wrappers, strips of brightly colored plastic, or the lost eyes of teddy bears for its nest; he seeks out the keys to characters. Some will be dissected then discarded; others will find their way into the pages of the novel.

"Novel writing makes you think so much about people. If you want to develop a real character you have to study people. It would be so easy to have simply a neat judgment of people, but that would not make for a very interesting character," says Leake of the observational and detachment skills needed to form breathing characters.

"I am in Bali trying to work out my female character. I have spoken with a lot of women and from that comes a composite. When I sit down to write these characters are developed," says Leake.

Earlier research took Leake to Malaysia in search of an old colonial family who had stuck it out through the thick and thin of a world war and the forging a nation's independence.

"My friend, a Brit, said there was no chance. We were at a bar one night and there was an English woman - we got chatting and I asked her how long she had been in Malaysia - had her family been there forever? Her husband had. During the Second World War he packed the family on a ship to Australia to wait out the war while he stayed on in Penang. These people are still around - it's incredible."

Leake says he needs to hear voices, see faces and absorb characters to breathe life into his next work that, "is fun now. Meeting people and trying to build characters, but once I come to writing, it is 90 per cent sheer hard work", says Leake of the tenacity needed to tramp across the 100,000 words needed to build a book.

Tenacity played its part during Leake's four years on Entering Hades and will no doubt be his companion during the years it will take to complete his Indonesian odyssey.

It is this attention to detail, this honest interest in the subjects, like Leake's interest in the real life Viennese psychopath versus cops from two continents in Entering Hades, suggests his first non-fiction work from Indonesian shores will be a read worth waiting for.

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