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“Sumatra...”

“The sixth largest island in the world,” said Brooke, running his finger around a spear-shaped landmass on the map. “Nominally under Dutch control but really a patchwork of warring tribes, feudatory states, pirates.”

“An uneasy population of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, headhunters and animists,” added the lady. “And ghostly ruins in the jungle that go back thousands of years.”

“And containing the richest minerals, timber, and gold resources in the region,” said Brooke. “It’s uncertain that any one person, or group, or nation could ever control the place—the Dutch gave up trying a hundred years ago-- but if anyone did, he would control the archipelago and the Far East trade that goes with it. Naturally this would not be in the interest of Sarawak and her allies.”
from Ghost Eater

Anyone who has had the good fortune to have visited mysterious Sumatra knows what it is to be tantalized. Even up to a very few years ago (I was last there in 1978), this vast island was still an unspoiled wilderness, home to only a few modern outposts, a place where tigers and rhinos and elephants still had the run of things.

It was a place both primeval and historical, for the ghosts and ruins of ancient civilizations make their presence and it seems the deeper one penetrates into Sumatra’s formidable wilderness, the more surprises one uncovers, not the least of which are the remains of once-great cities dating from the 12th century or earlier and associated from the once-powerful Srivijaya kingdoms of south India.

 The Chinese planted trading settlements on the island as early as the 13th century and successive waves of other settlers and would-be conquerors, Muslim Arabs and the Dutch, have left their marks on the islands rich and diverse cultures. There are of course many indigenous tribes, most prominently the Bataks in central Sumatra, home to the fictional Radjah Dulah and his mad son Prince Bandarak.

I carried a copy of F.M. Schnitgers’s Forgotten Kingdoms in Sumatra during my travels along the south Sumatra coast and north of the original Dutch settlement of Palembang hoping that I might stumble across lost pyramids and the vestiges of ancient cities too. I did find vestiges, yes, but they were disappointing finds—a crumbling foundation of indeterminate age, pieces of a smashed stele or plinth, a flight of stone steps that led up an embankment and abruptly ended, offering only a view of wild birds flying in and out of the treetops of the jungle below.

The Sumatra Schnitger explored in the 1930s has largely vanished, the ruins and monuments he described and photographed having been reclaimed by the relentless jungle or by the history thieves that have been picking the island clean for decades. More of the historical past has vanished, along with habitat, with the building of the Trans-Sumatra highway that slashes through the heart of the island. Deforestation and poaching of wild animals have taken a devastating toll as well, as they have in so many of the wild places of the world.

It is the idea of Sumatra that tantalizes and that led me choose the island as the major setting for Ghost Eater. That idea encompasses a sense that the natural order of things is still so much more powerful than the human order and in those places where the human order (or disorder) triumphs, the victory is short-lived and not without consequences-- and sometimes devastating outcomes.

I might add to this that there is a supernatural, or if you prefer, irrational, order of things at work here too, for everywhere one travels in Sumatra there are stories of ghosts and emanations, of millenarian prophecies and persistent legends, not the least of which is the belief in the orang gugu, or the anak as I call them in my story, the man-apes of western Sumatra, sightings of which are as persistent as those of Sasquatch in the American Northwest and the Yeti of the Himalayas.

I suppose there may be some readers who see this story set in “Joseph Conrad Country” or in some sense Conradian. Outside of a common period and geography, I was not haunted by Conradian echoes in the writing of this book, for I knew I was telling a very different kind of tale.

If there was any fictional influence on Ghost Eater, it has not been Joseph Conrad, whose work I greatly admire, but Robert Louis Stevenson, whose work I admire even more, and perhaps just a dash of W. S. Maugham, both of whom had a kindred fascination for the Orient and what we today call the Pacific Rim.

 That said, literary influences which critics and some readers seems so concerned about are, for the writer, merely puzzling, since, unless one is clearly modeling a story say, in the vein of Conan Doyle, with Sherlock once more resurrected from his Baker Street sarcophagus, such influences recede in the telling of one’s own tale, and become as transubstantiated as the bread and the wine at Catholic mass.

Recommended Reading on Sumatra:

Benedict Allen: Hunting the Gugu: In Search of the Lost Ape-Men of Sumatra (Paladin, 1990). A young Englishman’s engaging, tongue-in-cheek account of his search for the Orang gugu.

Edwin M. Loeb: Sumatra: its History and People (Longitude, 1990). The classic study of the islands cultural life, first published in 1935.

F.M. Schnitger: Forbidden Kingdoms in Sumatra (Oxford UP, 1989). This is a wonderful book of Sumatra lore, written by an intrepid and eccentric adventurer and amatuer arachaeologist who traveled Sumatra in the 1930s.