Lack of Funds

One of the most famous opening lines of US postmodern fiction is "—Money...? in a voice that rustled." Chris Benjamin, born the year year J R (1975) came out, begins Drive-by Saviours with the birth of one of his two main male characters, Bumi, in Rilaka, a seemingly fictional island in Indonesia. "From the beginning Bumi's eyes pierced harder than any other's, glowering while his father forced him to try football, glowing brightly at the chance to help the man count market money from mainland fish sales. By age four he'd humbled his father by becoming a faster and more accurate bookkeeper." Like JR Vansant, Bumi is an apparent innocent, and he doesn't find the "sandy paradise" of his island nearly as interesting as numbers, languages, and engineering. He invents a fishing net so that his father, Yusupu, can spend less time at sea and more time with him. "The lighter workload and greater cash flow that came [the fishermen's] way...resulted not in more play time with his father, but less," and with time to kill, the men drink more. Things become difficult for Bumi; his mother, Win; and his mentally challenged sister, Alfi, as their father changes, just as life on Rilaka does. The lesson, unlearned by Bumi, is that innovation, if not accompanied by sufficient thought about its ramifications, can lead to troubling social and domestic problems.

Further changes come in the young boy's life when Indonesia's dictator-president, Suharto, sees "'a chance to get some easy money from the World Bank,'" as one mentor tells Bumi, by enacting a policy to better educate the population. Benjamin prioritizes the effects: "Rilaka was hard hit by this development and the new needs it created. Twenty percent of the labour force was to be siphoned away like overpriced gas, the twenty per cent that ate the least. And with Bumi's departure they would lose their top engineer, bookkeeper and translator. But all these losses were nothing compared to the departure of fifteen children aged six to eleven years." Maybe the villagers feel that way, but Benjamin underlines the economic impact. From the first pages, he establishes a narrative in which people are objects that can be moved around, disposed of, and treated as commodities. Under the auspices of enlightenment, education, like commerce, is an instrument of oppression.

A sizable part of the novel has chapters that alternate between showing Bumi as he grows up, gets married, becomes a father, and gets into serious trouble, and the adult life of Mark, a social worker in Toronto, Ontario, who is married to a model, estranged from his family, and afraid of much that life has to offer. Where Bumi is the spark, the person who creates opportunities through his precocious intelligence, Mark is the grump who states, "I was content when I was twenty-five years old." He can only fall from here. He has little connection with the clients he sees: "They gave me the Coles Notes version of all their problems and I made suggestions, like a drive-by saviour." His one talent is writing grant proposals that put a sheen of respectability on this eleemosynary activity. Though separated by thousands of miles, he and Bumi are connected by an ability and interest in finance that results in benefits primarily for others.

It doesn't spoil anything to say that Bumi winds up in Toronto and both characters meet. Well before this, the reader will have recognized from Bumi's rituals, constant washing, and other indicators, that he has OCD, though in Indonesia it appears he's practicing black magic. Mark manages, in one of his few successful interventions, to get him to a doctor so he can learn that he's not alone in his illness, and that there are medications and ways to control his thinking and behavior. Mark also realizes that his sister Michelle, who he hasn't talked to for some time, must have suffered from the same condition since they were children...