A Tale of Two Jinns: A Review of Ramadan Sky by Nichola Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ramadan Sky tells the story of a brief and inevitably ill-fated cross-cultural love triangle set in Jakarta. Against the city’s backdrop of poverty and corruption (described as its two evil jinns), the story unfolds over most of a year as Vic, an Australian English teacher, falls for her much younger and hot-tempered ojek driver, Fajar. He has an on-again, off-again engagement to a girl in his neighborhood, Aryanti, the kind of good Muslim girl he can marry, but will never quite love.
The novel makes graceful use of three (or really four) different narrators: each character in the triangle, plus Vic’s journal. This is a feat for such a short novel, but the choice gives us useful access to what is most important in this particular story–economic strangulation that narrows young people’s futures to a few unattractive options, and the expatriate loneliness behind Vic’s financial patronage, which adds an uncomfortable element of dependence to her relationship with Fajar. We get a layered portrait of a Westerner’s experience in an economically crippled city, a deceptively simple love story shaded with a dark history of neo-colonialism.
What I love about these kinds of stories (I’m also thinking of Linda Horowitz’s While the Sands Whisper, which I edited last year), is that they depict the impossible complexities of a normal human relationship when it gets hung up on the rocks of money, history, culture, and need. We’ve all fallen for someone we hesitate to bring home to meet the fam, and it’s here, through this lens, that we’re also given a sidelong but rich glimpse into a different world. I’m a sucker for stories about Islam, and though Ramadan Sky could be told using almost any set of traditions that chafe their younger generation, this was my first literary encounter with Indonesia. The setting details are rich, and thanks to Vic’s droll sense of humor, the portraits of expats are funny.
I give the book four stars–pretty much my highest rating for everything short of Atwood and Tolkein.
