Troppo is going to be on the 2020 reading list for the Indonesian book group I belong to, and it's a good choice for discussion because it's the story of a young Australian woman who goes to work in Sumatra, offering the perspective of an Australian who is fluent in Indonesian and knows the country quite well. Like Simone Lazaroo (who won the award in 1993), Dickie writes as an outsider with some inside experience of Indonesia. Most of the people in our group have a great deal of inside experience of Indonesia, so I'm looking forward to hearing what they think of the novel.

Penny, the central character and narrator of the story, is her own worst enemy. The book begins with an alarming incident where she hears first-hand from a young woman who had worked for her future boss, Shane, but she decides to ignore those warning signs. Penny is a keen surfer, telling herself that she's in Sumatra to manage a coastal resort for a few months so that she can surf in her time off, but really, she's running away. She's evading the problems she is having in her Australian relationship with a man called Josh. Some years older than her, he is everything she is not: prudent, sensible, and comfortable with routines. He's career-minded, and settled-down contentedly in Perth. But Penny, perhaps because of her disrupted youth which included time out with her father on Bali for a year, likes to party, to drift, and to have an adventurous lifestyle. Reckless and naïve, Penny is warned off working for Shane by both expats and the locals with whom she is staying, but she ignores the weight of all this hostility and takes up her job at the resort. (His offer of a huge bonus if she lasts for six months helps her to make up her mind!)

Troppo shows this young woman experiencing a conflict of values. The novel is set in November 2004, just after the Bali and Denpasar bombings, and just before the Boxing Day tsunami. In contrast to her free-and-easy year on Bali, she finds the oppressive influence of strict Islamism has spread to the remote village of Batu Batur, and it makes her feel uneasy. She wants to respect Indonesian customs and culture, and she disapproves of young women flouting the cultural mores with scanty clothing, but she's used to Western freedoms, and feels resentful of restrictions placed on women because of their gender.

Penny is not a blithe tourist with a romanticised perspective: she observes the back-breaking labour in the rice paddies and feels uncomfortable about her own privileged position. At the same time, while she knows that she and Westerners like her are regarded as rich by virtue of their capacity to travel, to holiday, and to spend freely in the Indonesian economy, she has finite resources when it comes to returning to Australia. At home she is certainly not rich, and her erratic work history in the unqualified hospitality sector makes her financial future rather precarious. But her feelings of guilt lead to impulsive generosity — which of course reinforces local opinion that she has money to burn...

Considering herself well-acquainted with the domestic politics of commercial development in Indonesia, Penny thinks that the hostility to Shane is because of his impact on village life. But she is inevitably compromised. Her job involves working in a resort that supplants the local culture with its lavish facilities. Still, she can see that not only have the local fisherman had their livelihood disrupted by restrictions imposed by Shane, but also that resort development doesn't benefit the locals if they're not employed there.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/12/06/troppo-by-madelaine-dickie/ ( )