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Historian Anthony Reid on allure of fiction
Anthony Reid (JP/Evie Breese)Prominent historian of Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid, has used the opportunity to look at the past creatively — through a somewhat romanticized lens — in his first novel
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Anthony Reid (JP/Evie Breese)
Prominent historian of Southeast Asia, Anthony Reid, has used the opportunity to look at the past creatively — through a somewhat romanticized lens — in his first novel.
In 1995, New Zealand-born Reid had just published the second volume of the work for which he would become best known, called Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680: Expansion and Crisis, and was conducting fieldwork among the Batak people in North Sumatra.
Already a prominent historian, he wanted to try his hand at anthropological fieldwork through submersion in the local culture to study the area’s transition to modernity.
Finding himself in relative isolation and separated from his wife for an extended period, he decided to write the first chapter, and a daringly raunchy one, of a novel he had been imagining in his head on the many trains and buses involved in traveling to the rural locations.
Reid continued to cement his career as a historian, becoming a founding director of the Asia Research Institute (ARI) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2001. His most recent academic work A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads was published in 2015.
More recently, after having “paid his debts” to academia and officially retired, Reid was able to return to work on the historical fiction he started some 20 years ago.
A radical departure from history, Reid described the challenge as “a wonderful liberation”.
To signify the novel Mataram — launched last weekend in Jakarta at the International Forum on Spice Route — as a work of fiction, Reid chose to publish under the pen name Tony Reid.
Mataram is an adventure story set in 17th century Java, a place in turmoil between its Hindu-Buddhist past and Muslim future.
The novel’s hero, British sailor Thomas Hodges of the East India Company ventures ashore at the pepper port of Banten in 1608 to embark on an expedition to the mysterious kingdom of Mataram, accompanied by Javanese love interest Sri.
Inspired by James Clavell’s Shogun, which explores feudal Japan through the eyes of an English sailor, Mataram seeks to bring exotic and seemingly obscure 17th century Java to an English-speaking audience.
Through the English protagonist’s “astonished eyes”, readers become acquainted with Java’s rich past of gods and spirits, a sterner Islam and quarreling Europeans offering both Jesus and science.
Reid admitted that he originally struggled with the dialogue element of fiction writing, which he said “took a little getting used to”.
An element of writing he reveled in, however, was the opportunity to imagine what might have happened when the historical sources were patchy or non-existent.
In 1608, little was recorded about the mysterious interior kingdom of Mataram, largely unreached by foreigners. This provided the perfect setting for Reid to allow his imagination to fill in the gaps.
In this novel of love, faith and power, Reid certainly ticks all the essential boxes for an exciting adventure story. Religion is, undoubtedly, Reid’s main passion.
“[The 17th century] was a time in many parts of the world when the religious question was the question,” Reid explained.
Mataram includes many debates between characters including a Jesuit and a royalist, and a prince and a king who must figure out whether to impose the incoming Muslim faith or support a more pluralist society.
Reid has himself experienced the religious question, having been brought up in the Methodist denomination of the protestant faith, and later becoming a Catholic in graduate school at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. “It works well for me trying to sort out my problems by having these [characters] always fighting between each other,” he said.
Mataram depicts an era of Javanese history that Reid envisages to have been particularly open to new ideas, without certainty that one religion was more correct than another.
Overall, it is not too much of a surprise therefore that a man who has spent his life’s work documenting the complexities of Indonesia’s tumultuous past might want to contribute something more light to the library.
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— The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post.
