THIS first English translation of Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan’s output is intense, thrilling and violent.

Laced with trace elements of magical realism, Man Tiger is nonetheless a vivid account of the damaging consequences of economic deprivation and personal brutalisation.

The author draws on west Javanese mythological tales of people possessed by the spirits of male tigers, who explode in seemingly random acts of the most extraordinary terror.

Yet Kurniawan, in this excellent translation by Labodalih Sembiring, turns these stories on their heads by giving his protagonist a white tiger as a psychological companion and a female one at that.

Margio, a dispirited and lost youth — one of many in his village — commits the atrocious murder of neighbour Anwar Sadat by biting off his head. Anwar is not essentially a bad man, although his licentious behaviour towards women is an enduring scandal in the community. He has certainly treated Margio and his mother and sister well.

So why was he — and not the young man’s cruel and heartless father — singled out for such a death?

The novel unravels the causes of Margio’s pent-up fury and in doing so offers the reader insights into the poverty and domestic violence that is the norm for many of the poor in Java’s rural areas.

Kurniawan shows us a society riven between a few big landowners whose wealth is so great they forget which parcels of land are actually theirs and the majority of the populace whose dreams and ambitions are curtailed and stifled.

Margio’s mother is an especially well-written and poignant character. Her story develops from that of a naive young woman into a middle-aged wife whose appalling treatment leads her to seek solace in talking to her kitchenware and in tending vast tropical plants that grow to strangle their house in her despair.

Although much tighter in scale and size, and focused within a different set of cultural co-ordinates, this novel shares much with Aravind Adiga’s better-known and later published prize-winning White Tiger, which again deals with the unstoppable anger that cannot be repressed in an economic system that piles injustice upon injustice.

Kurniawan’s is the superior of the two in my opinion.

The author is associated with the leftist opposition that has regrown after the Suharto regime’s massacres of hundreds of thousands of communists in the 1960s. He is the literary voice of those who see through the Islamist and capitalist Establishment’s self-aggrandisement and corruption.

It comes as no surprise then that Margio is an alienated and ferocious hero for many young Indonesians today. As one of my Javanese friends says: “Margio reminds me of myself, sometimes.”

Review by Paul Simon