Jalan jalan loosely means to walk or wander around. In his 20s, Brit Newbie is desperate to escape his ‘‘Old Me'' and trade this for a ‘‘New Me'' who is not haunted by the recent death of his girlfriend, Laura.
On a whim he hops on a plane bound for Indonesia and soon enough finds himself playing the role of expat English teacher at English World; a role many native English speakers fresh out of university now know so well.
With sparse teaching qualifications bar his mother tongue, Newbie intrigues his charges and battles to maintain boundaries and professionalism with teen students keen for discussions on the same, and for him, slightly nauseating, topic.
Working split shifts and dwelling in the privacy-free suburb of Medan, his physical environment helps him claim new sight, where roads screech day through night with becaks and yellow buses called sudakos; where he sees children selling cigarettes with ‘‘child's eyes that have lost their wonder''.
He experiences the harsh disparity first-hand when tutoring the children of Davidoff-smoking magnates within their hermetically sealed, conscience-free lifestyle of pure opulence. Stoner's novel is compact, humorous and familiar.
Our first-person narrator is likeable, insecure and self-doubting, with faults we all recognise in ourselves. Laura does not succeed in maintaining her distance, however, as she insists on regularly interfering in his decision-making in italicised dialogue and flashbacks.
Our adventurer is amusing as he struggles with everything. Simply staying clean poses a challenge for him in a land where ‘‘flat feet plop across the dusty shed skin of people unknown, limbs of dead insects, and dirt walked in by rodents''. A light and uplifting read.
Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
