Curiosity Cabinet

Every Victorian and Edwardian gentleman kept a cabinet of curiosities. A glass-fronted case, or a corner of the study, or a single drawer in a campaign chest; somewhere to house the small objects a life of travel and reading had accumulated. A piece of coral from the Sulu Sea. A betel nut cutter from Brunei. A coin found in a market in Aden. A bird's egg, a piece of carved ivory, a photograph in a leather frame. The objects were not arranged by category or date. They were arranged by the private logic of the man who had collected them, and they told, when read in the right order, the story he could not otherwise have told aloud.

The Brooke Papers are that cabinet, brought out of the study and onto the page. The items collected here are real. They sit in my own house, on shelves and in drawers, gathered over seventeen years in Borneo and the years since. Each one carries its small piece of the Edwardian Malay world: a parang in its scabbard, a betel box, a kris with its handle worn smooth, a tin of Three Castles cigarettes, a length of Sarawak silver-thread cloth, a tiffin carrier, a stoneware jar that once held arak. The papers that accompany them are not so much pieces of writing as the labels a curator might pin beside each object. I share what it is, where it came from, what it was used for, and what the small unrecorded life that once handled it might have looked like.

This is the working room behind the novels. The objects in the Brooke Papers are the same objects that find their way, in time, onto a sideboard in Istana Kenyalang, or into a writing slope on a ship bound for Tilbury Docks, or into the hand of a man who is not entirely sure why he is keeping it. Some of them have already done that work. Some are still waiting to.