What makes an eminent historian turn to fiction? “To reach a wider readership,” Tony Reid, better known as his alter ego Professor Anthony Reid, explained at the recent launch in Canberra of his novel Mataram: A Novel of Love, Faith and Power in Early Java. And indeed, creative expression is many an academic’s dream, but few manage to pull it off.

Reid has done this wonderfully with his novel, set in early seventeenth century Java. It opens in Banten, which lies west of present-day Jakarta, and which at that time was a Javanese sultanate and a pepper port for European traders. The setting later moves further east to Japara on the coast, and then inland to the sultanate of Mataram in central Java.

The travellers who lead the tale and take the reader along on the journey are a (fictional) English seafarer called Thomas Hodges of the English East India Company, who reaches Banten with Keeling’s (historic) third East India Company voyage to Asia in 1608 and leaves his ship; and his female Javanese translator and lover, Sri, from a prominent mixed Javanese-Chinese family in Banten. Hodges is the protagonist of the novel, and it is through his eyes that we see Java. The first half of the book is an exciting road trip as Hodges and Sri, both on the run and posing as an English embassy from King James I to the ruler of Mataram, encounter danger, intrigue and suspicion on their arrival.

• Tags: Issue 14, Java, Jennifer Lindsay, Tony Reid