The first time I met Norman Lewis, the great intrepid traveler of our times was rubbing his hands together. He was already well into his 80s, but he was about to depart for a part of Irian Jaya where the last Western visitors—missionaries—had, he said, been eaten. “I can’t wait to go and hear more about that great evangelical feast,” he said, mixing, as he often did, drollness with real spirit.
When Lewis died last week at the age of 95, the world remembered him for the seamless polish of his prose, the quiet subversion of his deadpan wit and, perhaps, for the fortitude, stoicism and sense of curiosity that had once been Britain’s best contribution to the world-at-large. Yet those of us in Asia owe him a particular debt for his two post-war books, A Dragon Apparent and Golden Earth, which caught Vietnam, Laos and Burma as they will never be seen again. Even more than in his novels, in his study of the Mafia or in his description of the changes in a Spanish fishing village, the Asian books (joined later by works on India and Indonesia) showed him to be the rare writer who could give all his sympathies to the oppressed without ever losing a sense of urbanity and measure.
The best of Lewis will live as long as there is a Guatemala, a Sicily or a Burma to be drawn toward. But when he moved on, a certain way of seeing the world (with affection, wit and style), and a certain way of describing it (with unflappable wryness) moved on too. The fearless elegist of Southeast Asia had given us indelible portraits of a world that is already as far away as the last emperor in Hue.