Richard Lloyd Parry

** Richard Lloyd Parry is the winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize ** In the last years of the twentieth century, Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years it had been paralysed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto. But now the age of Suharto was reaching its end, giving way to a new era of chaos and superstition - the 'time of madness' predicted centuries before by poets and seers. On the island of Borneo, tribesmen embarked on a savage war of head-hunting and cannibalism. Vast jungles burned uncontrollably; money lost its value; there were plane crashes and volcanic eruptions. After the tumultuous fall of Suharto came the vote of independence from Indonesia for the tiny occupied country of East Timor. And it was here, trapped in the besieged compound of the United Nations, that Lloyd Parry reached his own painful, personal crisis.

In The Time Of Madness

As an independent republic Indonesia was fifty years old, but it sounded more like an unwieldy empire than a modern nation state.

'In the eyes of Dayaks," a Dayak teacher said, ‘when people do not respect our adat, they become enemies, and we don’t consider our enemies to be human any more. They become animals in our eyes. And the Dayaks eat animals.’

The well-being of a society is (often) dependent on the stability of its leadership. 

The Age of Gold gave way to the Time of Madness. And so the fall of a king became a general catastrophe.

'Nothing the Dutch imperialists had done in 350 years of depredations in the archipelago,' wrote Benedict Anderson, 'matched the speed, scale, and ferocity of Suharto's matanza against his own people.'

'Indonesia is a republic,' Vinny said, 'but really it's more like a kingdom, with Suharto as the king, and his children as the princes and the princesses. If you are a friend of Suharto, you can have any position in the government. If you are his child, you can have any business contract you like. The corruption is so high. But here in the countryside, the people are still poor.'

In The Time Of Madness quotes

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