Word: brunei
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...Vietnam is a member, pledging to refrain from activities that would destabilize the fragile status quo in the South China Sea. Few parties have kept to the spirit of the agreement. The Spratlys, an island chain far larger than the Paracels, are claimed by China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and nominally by Taiwan, and resemble a Risk game board with territories grabbed pell-mell over the years in a scramble for land and influence. Malaysia has set up a diving resort on one of its own reefs, while most other nations have military posts on their islands. "The ASEAN...
After less than two years of teaching at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Brunei Town, John Wilson, better known as the English novelist Anthony Burgess, nearly lost his mind. The tropical climes nagged him as much as his wife Lynne, whose zany behavior, like cursing out the Duke of Edinburgh, had turned them both into social pariahs. Add to that a bottle-of-gin-a-day drinking habit, and Burgess was pretty much pickled by September 1959, when an agreement was signed granting internal self-governance to Brunei, then a British protectorate. That month, Burgess one day crumpled...
...didn't, thankfully, and lived to write A Clockwork Orange, the dystopian novel on which Stanley Kubrick's cult film was based. A year before it hit the book stores, he published Devil of a State, about his time in Brunei. He had begun writing the scathing send-up of British colonial life, which is an equally sarcastic take on local mores and hypocrisy, during the year doctors told him he had left to live - a period in which he wrote torrentially, hoping to leave a financial cushion for his widow-to-be. The glib novel is crazed with misanthropy...
Devil of a State is now out of print, as hard to find as a bottle of whisky is in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei's capital. Barring the small amounts that non-Muslim visitors are allowed to bring in for their own use, alcohol is banned in today's Islamic Brunei. The present restrictions would have greatly dismayed Francis Burroughs Lydgate, the controller of passports, whom Burgess's book revolves around. Graying, thin, his teeth full of rot, 50-year-old Frank has married three times and hasn't been back to England in 24 years, working jobs from...
Dunia, a land of "palms and sweat and hot sauces" and stilt river villages, is clearly modeled after 1950s oil-rich, Anglophile Brunei. In Devil of a State a half-deaf U.N. adviser lives in the Residency, a version of the Bubungan Dua Belas, where British residents and high commissioners in Brunei lived until Brunei achieved full independence in 1984. Some streets in Bandar Seri Begawan retain their colonial names (Pretty, Stoney, McArthur), while the wooden House of Twelve Roofs is now a museum hung with photographs feting Brunei's "special relationship" with Britain. It helps to explain...