Three novels, two short and one long, all coming out of Hasse's experience of growing up in a middle-class Dutch family in colonial Indonesia before the Second World War, and analysing in different ways how that experience shaped her identity and view of the world.

Oeroeg (1948) — Classic postcolonial coming-of-age novella that started out as a Boekenweek gift and has been on school reading lists ever since. Superficially a very simple tale of friendship between two boys — one Dutch, the other Indonesian — who grow up together on a Javanese tea plantation between the wars, but actually a very subtle exploration of the workings of colonialism. Very nicely done.

Heren van de Thee (1993) — In principle, I'm not too keen on the idea of a documentary novel. I prefer to know where the historical record stops and the writer's interpretation starts. However, in this case it works very well. Haasse has been very self-restrained in her additions to the material.
Eliminating the author's modern viewpoint from a historical novel is obviously impossible. Haasse has selected things to tell us from the wealth of material before her, and kept other things back. Someone writing 75 years earlier with the same pile of letters before them would certainly have made a different selection. But what she has done is to eliminate all explicit narratorial references to things or ideas from outside the characters' timeframe. She presumably imagines a little more about the characters thoughts and words than she could have derived directly from the letters, and she must have filled in some everyday details of life in colonial Java from her own experience. That approach allows her to pass on the quasi-feudal, white-man's-burden approach to colonialism her characters adopt (and the even less enlightened view of women most of them exhibit) without any editorial comment. It's frustrating, sometimes: in the early part of the book where we get several chapters of pure unadulterated Rudolf I was almost ready to give up. But when Jenny also enters the scene, the technique starts to make sense.

We don't need lectures on colonialism. Haasse gives us enough evidence to make our own minds up about the particular form of it practiced by these plantation owners. Unlike the situation described in Max Havelaar, Rudolf Kerkhoven and his many cousins evidently did take some responsibility for the conditions of their workers, and at least some of them put part of the profits of their enterprise back into the local economy. Haasse takes care to show us (and presumably Rudolf & co. took care to describe in their letters) how their workers treated the white bosses like feudal lords, showing them respect and offering service, but expecting in return the lord's protection in times of trouble. All the same, most of the proceeds were clearly going out of the country into the pockets of shareholders back in Holland, and we don't hear of any Indonesian plantation workers being sent to college to learn to be managers. Those posts were reserved for cousins.
Ultimately, I felt the real strength of the book was the subtle way Haasse brings out the complexity of Rudolf's character, without pushing us into any facile conclusions. We're left feeling very clearly that this was a real individual, impossible to categorise as good or bad, wise or foolish. And a man who achieved something, whether or not that achievement was ultimately worth it.

Sleuteloog (2002) — Basically the same plot as Oeroeg (naïve narrator realises rather late in the day that closest childhood friend has grown up to be a political activist), but with the genders exchanged and with fifty years of extra perspective and subtlety. Beautifully ambiguous. ( )