Map of the Invisible World

Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw HarperCollins HK$221

Tash Aw's impressive second novel opens in 1964, Indonesia's Year of Living Dangerously, when President Sukarno was at the height, indeed the cliff edge, of his power. Map of the Invisible World draws us into the psychological landscapes of five complex individuals - a Dutch painter, an American scholar, two orphaned Sumatran boys and a Jakarta student - who struggle to assert themselves in a nation increasingly at war with itself.

Into this maelstrom steps 16-year-old Adam. His adoptive father, Karl de Willigen, a Dutch painter, has been rounded up in a police raid on their once tranquil island of Nusa Perdo and Adam has gone to Jakarta in desperate need of help. Hope arrives in the form of Margaret Bates, an American scholar born in Papua New Guinea, whose long ago love for de Willigen has not faded with time.

The daughter of anthropologists, Bates is at once earnest and sophisticated, brittle and compassionate. She is adept at both Bahasa Indonesian and Javanese, she is fluent in Indonesian customs, philosophy, politics and history, yet Bates has ceased to understand this country that she loves. One of the finest scenes in Map of the Invisible World depicts Bates' brief meeting with Sukarno where she tries to persuade him to accept a gift - a painting - that will bring her something in return. The scene is a perfect example of Aw's ability simultaneously to inhabit West and East, with all their parallels and contradictions, and of Aw's very English, very Asian, literary voice. Bates is intimate with the culture yet she remains forever an outsider.

This fluidity across cultures, and the accompanying loneliness of truly belonging nowhere, runs like a question mark through Map of the Invisible World. Home, Aw intimates, leaves us just as surely as we leave it. 'Look at you,' Bates tells de Willigen in the final days of their relationship. 'Bali is staying put, it's you who's leaving.' But it is de Willigen's response that resonates: 'It is changing, Margaret - you can see that, can't you? And some day soon it will change so much that you'll find yourself marooned in a place you no longer know.'

As the search for de Willigen intensifies, Adam falls into the hands of Din, an educated Sumatran who has embraced violence as the necessary means to his idealistic ends. In nearby Malaysia, Adam's lost brother Johan lives a life of wasted decadence, fleeing from a history that can't be outrun. Rich and poor, the marginalised and the revolutionary, the powerful and the invisible, all are fighting to define not only themselves but the new Indonesia, an ancient place in the throes of being reborn.

Aw is a deeply compassionate writer and he moves with grace, wit and confidence through these intersecting lives. Bates, de Willigen and Din seek to change Indonesia in ways both personal and political but they see, every day - in lives such as Adam's and Johan's - how the tide works against them.

For the reader aware of what the first years of Suharto's coming regime will bring, Map of the Invisible World casts an even longer shadow, mapping the fragile peace before the violent explosion that will shake Indonesia and its citizens in the years to come. This is a painterly, haunting novel, imbued with a gorgeous intelligence.

Madeleine Thien's most recent book is the novel Certainty. She lives in Montreal