BALI: Ashes to Ashes

Bali - Ashes to Ashes is a love letter to "The island of the Gods" by prolific author, Kerry B. Collison - an island and its people he dearly loves. "False dawn's impressive moment blinked momentarily piercing scattered layers of tropical clouds." The novel is an historical recount of the annihilation of whole kingdoms, first by the Dutch invaders and later by the Japanese in World War 11. It is cleverly interwoven with the love stories of a shipwrecked American who made the island his home, and inadvertently set in motion generations of descendants who were related and fell in love with each other, not knowing how they were related. This had a transfixing effect on me as I read. I will forever be haunted by the spectacle of a whole household of Bali royalty, dressed in white, advancing towards the marauding Dutch invaders to commit a mass suicide - called the Badung Pupatum. "At close of the bloody day four thousand Balinese men, women and children lay dead." Despite the centuries of swift and brutal occupation by invading marauders, the depth and strength of the Balinese people have shone through the rainbow dust over their island and retained their unique traditional culture. Bali - Ashes to Ashes is a powerful and moving literary work of great merit.