Buried Treasure
Review of Erni Salleh’s The Java Enigma (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2020)
By S.R. Graham
Erni Salleh’s debut novel, The Java Enigma, hinges on high-stakes sea dives and the reclamation of lost artefacts, so much so that you might be waiting for someone to exclaim, “That belongs in a museum!” Salleh’s story, however, isn’t one of Western ravishment paraded under the guise of conservation. Rather, it is the tale of a young woman struggling to decipher the legacy left by her father’s untimely demise. Salleh’s protagonist is smartly enlivened by drawing upon Salleh’s own life experiences, but her protagonist’s development is curtailed by the story’s strong scholarship and the limitations of its secondary characters.
Irin Omar, Salleh’s protagonist, learns of her father’s death via a phone call at the opening of the novel: “I felt the silence all around me, the sound of [his second wife’s] cries and my own beating heart muffled.” Irin was kept away from her ailing father by her work as a research librarian examining the site of Borobudur. Salleh has made no secret of how her own father’s passing impacted this novel: “I had [a conversation] with my late father regarding his heirloom keris, and if he would pass it down to me as the eldest child, even though kerises were traditionally given only to sons. I suppose this story is one of the ‘what ifs’ where I could revisit the past.” Enter, then, her fictional heroine, whose father defies a lifetime of reality’s patriarchal roles; Irin inherits fragments of an ancient map of Java, and from there we follow her across land and sea as she unravels the secrets her father’s legacy has opened.
Salleh’s debut is an innovative blend of adventure fiction and her own biography. The story meets any genre standards one might have for this sort of fiction, with prison rescues staged by secret societies and illegal wreckage dives. Salleh’s own life experiences are woven tightly into the novel as well. Like her heroine, Salleh is a scholar of antiquities and also works as a librarian; she manages Singapore’s National Library Board’s Mobile Library Services. Her novel’s plot was inspired by a trip of her own—to Wales—where she helped to date a keris found by a local fisherman. Irin’s fascination with the intersection of cultures (tribal, pre-colonial, colonial, and contemporary) comes from Salleh’s own studies, and she cites Jeremy Black’s Power of Knowledge as a model for Irin’s interpretation of cartography. Salleh’s descriptions of Irin’s dives—some of the strongest prose in the book—undoubtedly is built from firsthand experience; her own father spent years working as a wreckage diver.
Though Irin’s grief creates the emotional stakes for the novel, what drives the engine of this tale is all the conspiracy, mystery, and swash-buckling one would expect in the treasure-hunting genre. Irin makes casual references to the works of Dan Brown, Arthur Conan Doyle, Salman Rushdie, and George Orwell. (What a pleasure to have a librarian in your ear as you read!) It’s easy to see elements of these authors’ works in Salleh’s narrative, but The Java Enigma never becomes derivative. Salleh has stated that she sought to bring the richness and complexity of the cultures in the Indonesian archipelago to light, and she’s well-qualified to do so. Her academic background is in Southeast Asian Studies, and her expertise in weaving history, lore, and religion creates a literary tapestry every bit as intriguing as the geographical maps her characters pursue. I won’t spoil the mysteries of Irin’s inheritance, but as in the Dan Brown novels, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Salleh’s expertise in regional history shines through much of the novel, but the history is ultimately prioritized over the craft of the novel itself; world-making and character development become secondary to factoids that fill the plot. Perhaps this is a predictable problem; it certainly isn’t a new one. Here’s a snippet from Shirley Jackson’s essay on craft, “Garlic in Fiction”: “It seems to me that in our present great drive—fiction-wise—toward the spare, clean, direct kind of story, we are somehow leaving behind the most useful tools of the writer, the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of the imagination from the everyday account.” The Java Enigma is quite a direct kind of story: the protagonist inherits a treasure map and follows it. With all of the pages given over to reporting history and clues, the realm of the imagination is curtailed. Consider the first time our protagonist is alone with her partner-in-crime after being wined and dined:
I was about to offer him the sofa for the night, instead of making him drive the two hours back to Semarang, when he started unbuttoning the top of his shirt. The vest was already off and resting on the back of a chair.
“What is that?” he asked, pointing behind me.
As he closed the gap between us, I was rendered speechless, simply rooted to the spot and watching him carelessly rake his shoulder-length hair back with his fingers.
With my face nearly pressed against his chest, it took all my energy not to breathe in too deeply. Turning and moving my eyes upwards, I followed his finger to the wall, to the map I had put up.
“Oh.” Taking a step back, I quickly turned away so he wouldn’t see my face that was no doubt a shade of red. “I pieced together [...] my father’s sketches and filled up the gaps with my own knowledge.”
After such an interaction, the reader would be justified in expecting Irin’s thoughts to be abuzz with the confusion of this moment. Is this man—Captain Frederick Nagel—invading her personal space purposefully? Are his intentions sexual or economic in nature? In other words, is he interested in Irin but notices the map, or is he interested in the map and so decides to feign interest in Irin? For Jackson, Irin’s perspectives on and reactions to this scene would determine how the plot next develops. Instead, the next page and a half is given over to a discussion of the Cham empire that ultimately fizzles out, a tangential piece of history that has no larger significance for the characters than to keep them following the map, which they were already doing. What is lost by this prioritization of history over character is the food of fiction: the weaving of psychological truth and the parsing of meaning so that the reader may see their own motivations, depths, and choices reflected back to them through the depths of the characters the author creates.
Irin, whose character is built mainly through external forces, is aided in her travels by her father’s best friend and contemporary, retired Captain Noah Bootsma, along with his protege, the aforementioned Nagel. Both men are molded in the fashion of Western stereotypes, which isn’t too problematic in the case of the older captain; his jovial condescension is tone-deaf but easily believable given his generation and background. “My dears” and “little miss” pepper his speech patterns, and his rather sexist but harmless jokes can easily be dismissed as they are intended: relics from an earlier age, when men were men and boys would be boys. It’s a type of Western masculinity born out of the Industrial Revolution that is only now beginning to fade. What’s a bit more grating is the cliched strong, silent type of the younger Frederick Nagel, or rather the fact that Irin seems so drawn to him. His perceived slights are met with a “huff” or coquettish ignorance, but when he is a “gentleman” the two end up bantering in hotel rooms together—on separate beds, of course! The mental gymnastics of Irin’s on-going “will-they-won’t-they?” with Nagel would be interesting in an Elizabeth Gaskell novel, but in 2020 Irin’s unexamined, performative modesty comes off as rather thick-headed, which in turn leaves the reader questioning her reliability on other topics, say, clue-solving or secret societies.
The secret society of The Java Enigma is the Gnostes (“Ones Who Know”), and it serves as the novel’s deus ex machina, rescuing or threatening Irin in turn, depending on what is necessary to the plot. The society is represented by a woman known only as Hoang, who appears always dressed in red, switching languages with ease. Since Irin herself speaks multiple languages and jets across not only Southeast Asia but Europe as well, Hoang’s worldliness doesn’t take on the sinister tone that one might expect from a secret society liaison. Instead she becomes an object of curiosity, the only other woman in a novel of all cis-heterosexual men. Her function is to deliver the company lines with just enough slip-ups for Irin to cobble together larger and larger pieces of the puzzle, and both women act out their roles with each other efficiently, with little nuance or human relation.
The puzzles, the conspiracies, the deep-sea treasure-hunting—all were set in motion by the death of a parent, but meaningful examination of Irin’s father or her relationship with him is drowned beneath waves of historical and nautical scamperings. By the end of the novel, what we know of the man might fit into a few lines, less than an obituary. He was an expert diver, naughty as a child, secretive but loving, proud of his children; take out the “expert diver” and the list could refer to anyone. Grief is elusive and singular as the person who experiences it, but Salleh doesn’t let the reader in on Irin’s, and so any emotional journey our protagonist might be taking isn’t one we’re invited to join. That leaves us to throw our lot in with her more external wanderings: the mysterious map, what it signifies, where it’s leading.
Mystery writers are mostly known to be a pretty generous lot: they dole out clues like breadcrumbs, and a discerning reader can (often) guess where the plot is going and (sometimes) whodunnit. Solving such a brain-teaser can be enjoyable no matter the author’s literary acumen: Agatha Christie’s characters are famously stereotypical, yet according to the Guinness Book of World Records, she remains the best-selling novelist of all time. What separates The Java Enigma from classic mysteries is the fact that all of its clues are privileged information; the solving of the mystery isn’t beholden to logic or close observation, but rather to whether you happen to be a scholar on antiquities who also has a working relationship with cartography. All the bits and bobs of interesting history end up feeling rather arbitrary, as if Irin has had cherry-picked for her only the most relevant information: there are no red herrings, no dead ends, just a smart young woman lightly lecturing us as she proceeds unerringly toward her inevitable success.
There are enormous historical and religious implications in what Irin comes to find, but she doesn’t seem all that invested in its significance for humanity. By the end of the novel, she’s taken a “let the chips fall where they may” attitude, and divvies up portions of her winnings so that the Gnostes get what they want, Nagel gets what he wants, and the greater good gets an indifferent nod in that no artifacts are actually destroyed (or buried in a museum catalog). What Irin endured and discovered has not changed her or the larger world. She ends the book as she began it: grateful for her father’s legacy, lightly infatuated with Nagel, ready to begin her next adventure. The story ultimately only skims the surface; however, this could change in the future. The Java Enigma doesn’t deliver buried treasure, but it certainly sets the stage for a sequel.
S.R. Graham is an American writer living in Philadelphia.