My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not a spoiler because it’s made clear early in the book: Mike Stoner’s protagonist Newbie has come to Indonesia on the run from the grief he’s suffering from the accidental death of his English girlfriend. Jalan Jalan is an accomplished entry into the ‘Clueless Westerner in Asia’ genre.
Most chapters contain an episode about Newbie’s life in Indonesia and then an imagined conversation with his dead girlfriend. This gave the character depth but slowed down the arc of the ‘in Indonesia’ narrative. I found myself rushing through the girlfriend sections.
Many of the Indonesia set pieces involve drug taking in Medan or in the famous tourist destinations within the reach of that Sumatran city.
I could relate.
Newbie takes magic mushrooms at Lake Toba and has a bad trip – an almost de rigeur experience for the backpacker/English teacher in Sumatra. I adapted my own experience of taking mushrooms at Lake Toba into an episode in my novel Smoko, changing the setting to the NZ bush.
Stoner and his predictable but well drawn rabble of English teacher colleagues buy ecstasy off a waiter in a club in Medan. Once again Newbie doesn’t really enjoy the trip – and perhaps his colleagues don’t either. I’ve often wondered why Westerners drug and drink so much in Asia when they don’t actually seem to enjoy it (I include myself in this group). They do it as a kind of sacrament – a duty to the tradition, and also a way of escaping and enhancing an environment that to them is very weird and different.
I remember taking ecstasy in a club in Surabaya. Yes, my friend really did buy the pills from the bar staff. The club was pitch black – you had no idea who was touching you. Too freaky an environment for me while high and I had to leave. I was on holiday from my teaching job in Wuhan, China and had no idea how to return to the suburban house of the English teacher we were crashing with. My friend didn’t want to leave the club so I was on my own. Somehow I managed to get back to the house. I remember a bluebird taxi, wandering streets for an hour, and then lying on the couch tripping balls.
Newbie teaches the kids of the owner of the club where they sell the drugs. This is Charles, a super-rich Chinese Indonesian whose family suffered greatly in the 98 anti-Chinese violence. Charles is a mercurial figure, a kind of gangster with a heart of gold. As Tim Hannigan notes, Stoner doesn’t explain much about the status of the Chinese ethnicity in Indonesia when perhaps he should have. However, it’s impressive how little exposition Stoner uses full stop. Maybe creative writing classes do have their uses… I note Stoner has an MA in creative writing.
Newbie only stays 9 months in Medan and Stoner was there for one year, so don’t expect any great insights into Indonesia. However, this novel nails the teaching in Indonesia experience. Newbie is a self-absorbed protagonist but complex enough to keep us interested. I’m glad Jalan Jalan had some success – it was reviewed in The Guardian in 2016. I’m sad to see Stoner hasn’t written much since.
I bought my paperback of Jalan Jalan in 2023 in a bookstore in the Khaosan Road area of Bangkok. From the quality of the paper and binding, I’d say it’s a pirate copy. It cost me about 3 USD. If you write this kind of book, I guess you’d want that for it? To be offered as a knock off in the biggest Southeast Asian backpacking hub. However, my buying it felt like a requiem for yesteryear. Khaosan Road isn’t what it was, and neither is the market for backpacker classics in pirate paperbacks.
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