A HEART OF DARKNESS ON THE ISLE OF BORNEO

Author: By Kai Maristed

Date: SUNDAY, April 19, 1998

Page: N3

Section: Books

Kalimantaan, as the reader of C. S. Godshalk's lush, sensual, and boldly intelligent first novel will learn, is Malay for the island of Borneo. In her opening pages, the author warns, ``There are singular conditions . . . holding sway in that place and nowhere else. The eerie speed of some things and the wretched slowness of others. The speed with which one sickened and died. The eternal lagging of a letter. The months it took to work through those forests and the blinding velocity of the rivers. . . . The almost daily attendance of death and the violent inrush of life.''

Certainly the pace of this long, dense narrative reflects both eerie speed and wretched slowness. For its first hundred pages, as Barr with a fortuitous mix of instinct and stubborness carves out his enclave of more-or-less Western civilization, ``Kalimantaan'' dwells on landscapes and fauna, Malaysian alliances and the logic of headhunting cultures, like a Baedeker guide that has loosened its stays. Barr is guest or host of such an array of colonial ``characters'' that for all their eccentricities these buccaneers and Dutchmen, churchmen and chieftains become difficult to distinguish one from another. The text itself is jungle-like -- bristling with unattributed pronouns and unglossed native vocabulary. Then, like a sudden brisk shift of wind in the sails, an awkward 17-year-old arrives to legitimate the rajah's realm: Amelia, Ranee of Sarawak to be, called Melie.

A white rajah requires a white wife. While Barr's original, economic plan was to wed an available widowed cousin during a quick trip back to civilization, upon meeting this relative and her teenage daughter, he's moved to write to his true ``My Dearest,'' ``I shall marry. My cousin is too old but near the hen there is a chick who is altogether acceptable. Melie . . . does not rattle on. . . . There is some heaviness to the chin, but I believe I like it.'' Used to conquest, Barr carries off the chick.

Naive and fair-skinned, sensitive within and without, Melie is cruelly misplaced in Kalimantaan. Her longing for the genuine mother who sacrificed her own last chance at happiness for her plain daughter's sake stands in poignant contrast to Barr's oedipal obsession. Poisonous reptiles, monsoons, native magic, and murderous Chinese threaten Melie's life; she suffers debilitating rashes, fevers, diarrhea, self-doubt, and homesickness. Her moody, volatile husband is said to keep a mysterious ``black queen'' in an eyrie love nest upriver. As Melie's days lengthen to years, one is drawn into this intimate account: suffering with her, rejoicing in her discoveries and achievements, and cheering her improbable endurance.

The rajah's fortunes, based on heavy opium taxes, wax and wane. Churches are built; there are gardens, a gazebo and an ear-splitting band. Bloodthirsty battles are waged against and among the indigenous Dyak tribes on the steaming rivers of the interior. Barr rules by a system of white ``residents,'' the often half-crazed and foolhardy commanders of far-flung outposts. A young relative, Richard Hogg, proves ablest of them all. His approach to ``peacekeeping'' includes decapitation (to save bullets), burning of houses, and killing of women, because, he explains to a female colonist, ``No Dyak female will accept a man without an extra head. Women are the principal instigators of their bloody campaigns.'' Hogg is colonialism's evolutionary next step and Barr's heir apparent: mesmerizing, horrifying and indispensable.

Meanwhile, after spells of promise, Melie's fortunes turn increasingly grim. Her first two pregnancies end in stillbirths. The third infant survives, and grows into a ``merry, bright presence'' until she, too, is swept away, age 4, by a cholera epidemic. Sorrowing Melie conceives again: That year ``It was a rain of infants, a torrent of sweet young flesh to be flushed out in storm drains, gills flapping in the mud . . . like the little turtles at Talang Talang.'' Melie gives birth to twin boys.

And the twins, in their turn, will die in childhood, as does the parent-less native boy Melie takes in, as do, like a steady, increasing patter of rain, the infants and children and adoptees of friends and servants and enemies, who themselves will succumb before their time, to smallpox, kris blade, floodwater, or vengeful spirits. Godshalk, in the publisher's note, describes her novel as being ``about all aspects of human love, and the genius we have developed for missing it.'' To this reader ``Kalimantaan'' is far more an exploration of the ways of death, and its genius for finding us.

It is uncommon for a work of fiction to finish, as this one does, with a lengthy list of source material. ``Kalimantaan'' follows closely the real-life history of the ``white raj'': the rise and fall of the Boone family in Sarawak as documented in their own copious writings and fictionalized most notably by their near-contemporary, Joseph Conrad. (While ``Lord Jim'' is most obviously Boone-inspired, it is the spirit of ``Heart of Darkness'' that suffuses the present work.)

To ask whether ``Kalimantaan'' is, exactly, fiction, is all too reminiscent of the debate over memoir-as-novel, novel-as-memoir. Does it matter? Conrad himself wrote, ``Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.'' Imagination, then: This novel splendidly conjures up the experience of whites under raj, especially of women, in stunning images. But what about the inner lives of the ``black creatures,'' as Dyaks are here termed, and of the ``impassive'' Chinese? They figure only sketchily as exotic Others -- stylized actors. It is perhaps not surprising that 10 years' immersion in the memoirs of Victorian imperialists might constrain a scholar's view. In a novelist, the effect is of a strange ventriloquism, an impassioned voice thrown backward over time.