Word: lloyds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Asian financial crisis impoverished millions, fueling street protests against Suharto's kleptocratic government. Christians and Muslims warred in Ambon; the nation of 17,000 islands "seemed to be breaking up and slowly sinking." Nowhere was the violence more barbaric than on the island of Borneo, where Lloyd Parry chases down news of tribal fighting between the Dayaks, one of the island's indigenous tribes, and the Madurese, transplants from Java. Penetrating the jungle, he doesn't find fighting so much as slaughter, and worse. The Dayaks, rumored to possess black magic that renders them impervious to bullets, have massacred entire...
Sitting beside the sultan's palace in Yogyakarta, Richard Lloyd Parry decided to leave Indonesia. He would return to London, where there was a woman he loved waiting for him, "a face and the smell of clean skin"; he would put on hold his life as a reporter covering Asia for the Independent. But in Jakarta, where he waited for his plane to Europe, Lloyd Parry stalled. Maybe it was just cold feet; maybe it was a foreign correspondent's instinct for impending mayhem. He canceled his flight and headed into the city, just in time to catch a student...
...Before the troubles had run their course, Lloyd Parry would see men eating human flesh in Borneo, bodies burning in the streets of Jakarta, and a seemingly unassailable government collapse. In the Time of Madness is a deeply felt account of his time covering Indonesia's implosion; what it lacks in depth or context, it makes up for in sensitivity and humility. This is a book less about Indonesia than about Lloyd Parry himself, how the carnage he witnesses burrows into his soul, leaving him sickeningly vulnerable when the time of madness reaches its horrifying climax in East Timor. There...
...greatest horror comes later, in the twinned crises of Suharto's fall and East Timor. In May 1998, Lloyd Parry reports from a burning Jakarta, "a capital city looted by its own people," as a mix of demonstrators and marauders run wild in the streets. The structure of Lloyd Parry's book, which seems to lack much new research, leans too heavily on a chronological, riot-by-riot retelling of his experience. But his elegant, understated prose preserves a bubble of sanity amid the madness; he's particularly adept at capturing the moments when history is about to be made...
...party over? Ivory without Merchant is like Conan without Doyle, or Lloyd without Webber. But I hope Ivory now 76, and Prawer Jhabvala, 78, continue. Just as Merchant-Ivory ignored the death notices for the movie traditions of craftsmanship and delicacy, and revived them for more than 40 years, it would be appropriate, and heroic, for the surviving partners to go on making fine films about the good manners of sad and complicated people...