‘Twilight in Jakarta’ – A portrait of a nation on the brink of disintegration

Among its many virtues, perhaps the most striking thing about Mochtar Lubis’ Twilight in Jakarta is that although written more than half a century ago in the 1950s, the novel illustrates that the fundamental tensions of Indonesian political life have changed little in the intervening years. A cursory reading of contemporary Indonesian newspapers confronts the reader with the problems of entrenched corruption, poverty, the manifold difficulties of erecting a functional democracy after years of authoritarian rule, the deep and ever-present fear of separatism and the specter of a metastasizing militant Islam that wants to up-end it all in a fire-swell of religiosity.