Black Water
By Louise Doughty, Faber & Faber, 344 pages, $26
Louise Doughty’s excellent new novel is a character study, a glimpse at mid-century American civil rights, a thriller, a meditation on the effects of foreign policy on individuals, a modern love story and a portrait of Indonesian unrest in the 20th century. And throughout it’s an attempt to explain in dramatic terms how someone lacking the zeal of patriotism might choose a life in the detached, pitiless and barely understood profession we call intelligence. If that sounds like a handful, it is. But Doughty has found an ideal vehicle for her wide-ranging interests: a laconic, ageing man, born Nicolaas Den Herder but known to colleagues and strangers alike as John Harper.
We’ve seen his type before — the world-weary spook, half-broken by a lifetime of regrets — but Harper is more than he appears at first glance. He’s also less, which is much to the benefit of the novel. When we’re introduced to him, he’s living in a hut on a hillside with a view of Mount Agung and a misty forest of palm trees, near the Balinese town of Ubud. Other than daily visits from his housekeeper, he speaks to no one and spends hours excoriating himself for some recent professional mistakes in Jakarta. Those mistakes, he believes, have a cost: Once the monsoon rains arrive to cover their tracks, young men with machetes will climb Harper’s lonely hill and butcher him. So he waits. But the skies remain clear — his life stretches on for another day — and he makes a fateful trip into town, where he meets Rita, a teacher escaping her own demons. Though he introduces himself as an economist, Harper is in fact a risk analyst, a contractor for Western governments and corporations, and his recent missteps have made him question both his abilities and the course his life has taken.
By the time he and Rita develop a romantic relationship, the reader knows that this kind of connection is a rarity for Harper. He overthinks everything. When she eventually says, “John, what happened to you?” we know that the story he tells her is one he might not have ever shared with anyone. The fact that he’s spilling it to someone he barely knows suggests how deep his self-doubt lies.
Harper’s personal history, it turns out, is tied closely to Indonesia’s. He was born to a Dutch mother in an internment camp during the brutal Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies. Before his birth, his half-Dutch, half-Indonesian father was beheaded by Japanese soldiers — a story young Nicolaas later used to impress xenophobic schoolmates. As the adult John Harper, he returned to Jakarta in 1965, just before the failed coup against the autocratic president Sukarno, and in time to witness and play a hand in the beginning of the counter-coup against the Communists, which killed hundreds of thousands of people — many of whom were targeted by lists supplied by the CIA. Now, in the late 1990s, after decades behind a desk in Amsterdam, he has been sent back to Indonesia as Sukarno’s successor, Suharto, tries to keep his grip on power during the debilitating Asian financial crisis.
“If you’re an economist,” Rita asks Harper, “can you explain why the IMF has put $40 billion into this region but the families of my students are still having to mix hard old corn kernels with their rice every morning, so that their stomachs won’t rumble in my class?”
“I could,” he answers, “but you wouldn’t believe me.”
Thirty years later, as Rita insists that times change, Harper has little reason to believe her.
In the global economy, these crises spell risk and opportunity. The last thing Western CEOs want is to wake up to discover that the mineral resources their companies have been mining for the past generation have been nationalised. So they hire fortunetellers like Harper, who put their feet on the ground, drink with the locals, bathe in their waters and, sometimes, sleep with them. They go into unstable countries to answer questions. How secure is the president’s position? Will the recent ethnic conflict endanger local staff? Will the rising price of rice undermine gains in the real estate market? And sometimes they do more than answer questions.
Harper’s employer, based in Amsterdam, is known only as “the Institute”. It’s represented by the occasional charming white man whose friendliness Harper — not quite white enough to blend in with them — never fully trusts. He’s worked for this operation since he was a young man, and that bloody Indonesian tour in 1965 was his first long-term field mission. That time, however, his client wasn’t a multinational; his client was the CIA.
Though it deftly navigates the subject, the focus of “Black Water” isn’t really American hegemony. It’s a boy named Nicolaas, who grows up to become John Harper, a cog in the machine of political and economic domination, a man who will find himself doing things in Indonesia that will haunt him, things whose violent aftereffects will echo down the years. In the novel’s evocative middle section, he takes us back to that man’s beginnings, from his prison-camp birth through his early childhood in 1950s Los Angeles, where he develops an intense love for his adopted grandfather, Poppa, a black civil rights lawyer. Then, after a grim personal tragedy, it’s off to the Netherlands to live with his erratic, alcoholic mother. Here Doughty seems to be asking another question: What leads a person to choose the kind of life Harper has led?
To dive into a culture while spying on it is to have a false sort of life, one that will only be half of what it could be. Your friendships are functional facades, your lovers temporary respites, your home whatever fits into your carry-on bag. The people around you become assets, tools for getting the job done. And the job in Jakarta will take Harper to dangerous places — places where innocent lives will be violently lost.
Doughty allows Harper to give a rich accounting of his childhood scars. And this magnificent portrayal of a childhood perpetually interrupted goes a long way towards excusing the complex, self-interested adult who springs from that past. But the reader might wonder if it involves one excuse too many. Does a person need so many tragedies to grow into a man who expects to be murdered as penance? Or could any of us end up being a John Harper?
The most virtuous character in “Black Water” is Nicolaas’s beloved Poppa, who risks everything to save those in need, even strangers. Is he not the one who requires explanation? As much as we pay lip service to helping others, few of us act on our own words. We move through our days preoccupied by our own priorities, self-preservation our North Star. No, the Harpers of the world make sense. The saints among us — those are the ones who are the hardest to understand.
–New York Times News Service
Olen Steinhauer’s latest novel is “All the Old Knives.”
