SETTING FREE THE WORD

By John Skow

Among the cruel ironies that have haunted the career of Indonesia's most acclaimed and influential writer, one stands out as especially grotesque. Pramoedya Ananta Toer's masterwork, four related novels known as the Buru Quartet, deals with the brutally oppressive Dutch rule of his country at the turn of the century; but the regime that burned his manuscripts and library, beat him so that he remains half deaf, jailed him for 14 years without charges or trial and still bans his books and restricts his travel is not Dutch but Indonesian.

During the first years of his imprisonment for leftist views by the military regime of General Suharto, Pramoedya, as the 71-year-old writer is known, was forbidden to have books and writing materials. The prohibition (enforced for all jailed intellectuals) was deadly serious, and at his hard-labor camp on the island of Buru some prisoners who violated it were executed. Pramoedya's response was to compose his novels orally and recite them to other prisoners. Eventually a sympathetic general allowed him paper and pen, and then a typewriter. From his own memory and what his prison mates could recall, he copied down the novels that would shame the Suharto dictatorship by taking on the name of its island prison and give the stubborn writer a reputation as Indonesia's Solzhenitsyn. And thus, so it is widely believed, make him Asia's leading candidate for a Nobel Prize.

Hype flows freely in such cases, and it is probably too late to make a strictly literary judgment of the Buru Quartet, whose concluding volume, House of Glass, has just been published in the U.S. by Morrow (365 pages; $26). The view here is that the quartet is indeed a marvel, but especially in its third and fourth volumes an exceedingly slow-moving and discursive marvel. The turbulent and bitterly angry first book, This Earth of Mankind, is the key to the rest, and though it is customary to say of concluding novels that they can be read independently, this is emphatically not true of the Buru Quartet, whose first three volumes, including Child of All Nations and Footsteps, have just been republished in paperback by Penguin.

The entire work of nearly 1,600 pages is what is called a bildungsroman, a novel of education, beginning in the late 1800s. Its main character is a brilliant young Javanese named Minke, the son of a minor native aristocrat, who excels as a token native student at an elite Dutch-language high school. But his true education, and that of a Western reader innocent of Indonesian history, is in the realities of racial and economic oppression.

These were astonishingly unjust, even for colonial times. Forced labor by natives, a kind of tax paid for the privilege of being ruled by Holland, was coming to an end, but expropriation of native land for sugar plantations and other industry was still common. Indonesians were without standing in civil or criminal disputes with whites, as Minke discovers when in his late teens he marries Annelies, an ethereal mixed-blood beauty. She inherits some property, and her venomous white half-brother has no trouble having the marriage declared nonexistent and sailing for Holland with both Annelies and her money.

The novels have been called Dickensian, largely on the basis of the first one, which is jammed with plot and characters and ends with the cliff-hanger of Annelies' legal kidnapping. But as the series continues, Minke's adventures--he becomes a journalist and publishes a successful newspaper in opposition to the Dutch rule--serve almost entirely as the framework for an endless series of questing dialogues. Sourly or hopefully, with colleagues or adversaries, Minke explores the nature of colonialism and capitalism, the psychology of police power, the role of women, the techniques of political organization, the efficacy of boycotts and much else. The tone is never haranguing, but the cumulative effect is that of a lifetime of scorn, heaped too high to ignore.

When at the end of Footsteps, the third novel, Minke's publishing empire is seized and he is sent into exile, the dialogues become anguished confessionals by one Pangemanann, a native police investigator who works for the government to undermine native political organizations. He adulates Minke, whom he has betrayed, and in House of Glass, the last novel, the author's torment of this official hypocrite is lashing and relentless.

It is not hard to see why cops in a police state find Pramoedya an embarrassment and a danger. A final irony in this rich lode is that for several years Pramoedya has suffered from writer's block in regard to his fiction. Presently he is working on an Indonesian encyclopedia. "Indonesia is still an abstract concept for me," he says wryly. An encyclopedia, he thinks, might help make this diffuse country of 17,000 islands and 365 languages and dialects a more graspable reality. For his readers, the Buru Quartet has already done that.