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Sitting beside the sultan's palace in Yogyakarta, Richard Lloyd Parry decided to leave Indonesia. He would return to London, where there was a woman he loved waiting for him, "a face and the smell of clean skin"; he would put on hold his life as a reporter covering Asia for the Independent. But in Jakarta, where he waited for his plane to Europe, Lloyd Parry stalled. Maybe it was just cold feet; maybe it was a foreign correspondent's instinct for impending mayhem. He canceled his flight and headed into the city, just in time to catch a student protest that would turn violent and help trigger the beginning of the end of Suharto's three-decade reign over the country. It was May 1998, and Indonesia was about to go insane.

Before the troubles had run their course, Lloyd Parry would see men eating human flesh in Borneo, bodies burning in the streets of Jakarta, and a seemingly unassailable government collapse. In the Time of Madness is a deeply felt account of his time covering Indonesia's implosion; what it lacks in depth or context, it makes up for in sensitivity and humility. This is a book less about Indonesia than about Lloyd Parry himself, how the carnage he witnesses burrows into his soul, leaving him sickeningly vulnerable when the time of madness reaches its horrifying climax in East Timor. There, in the face of violence aimed specifically at him, Lloyd Parry escapes on a military flight out of the devastated capital Dili, which militias against independence for East Timor have put to the torch. "I ran away," he writes, "and afterward, I was ashamed."

For a foreign correspondent, 1997-99 was a thrilling time to be in Indonesia—but it was a terrible time to be Indonesian.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis impoverished millions, fueling street protests against Suharto's kleptocratic government. Christians and Muslims warred in Ambon; the nation of 17,000 islands "seemed to be breaking up and slowly sinking." Nowhere was the violence more barbaric than on the island of Borneo, where Lloyd Parry chases down news of tribal fighting between the Dayaks, one of the island's indigenous tribes, and the Madurese, transplants from Java. Penetrating the jungle, he doesn't find fighting so much as slaughter, and worse. The Dayaks, rumored to possess black magic that renders them impervious to bullets, have massacred entire Madurese villages, dismembering their victims and eating them. In the town of Sambas, he finds Dayaks cooking human thighs over a fire. One man offers him a chunk of human meat—"gray, fibrous"—impaled on a wooden stick like a kebab. Lloyd Parry refuses, but he can't stop himself from asking the essential question. The answer is predictably gruesome: it's delicious, they say. Like chicken.

But the greatest horror comes later, in the twinned crises of Suharto's fall and East Timor. In May 1998, Lloyd Parry reports from a burning Jakarta, "a capital city looted by its own people," as a mix of demonstrators and marauders run wild in the streets. The structure of Lloyd Parry's book, which seems to lack much new research, leans too heavily on a chronological, riot-by-riot retelling of his experience. But his elegant, understated prose preserves a bubble of sanity amid the madness; he's particularly adept at capturing the moments when history is about to be made, as when he waits with 30,000 student protesters for the vacillating Suharto to finally surrender power. "In a century of such changes in countries all over the world, this was the last time that it would happen. Such events are flattering to those who witness them; you feel that just by being there you are courageous."

That borrowed courage can vanish when one changes from witness to participant, as Lloyd Parry learns during his reckoning in East Timor, the book's most gripping section. After the embattled province votes for its independence from Jakarta in 1999, Lloyd Parry watches as anti-independence militias, seemingly with the tacit approval of the Indonesian army, wreak havoc. But this time he's more than a spectator—the militias violently turn on journalists, forcing them to hole up in the United Nations' overcrowded compound. Inside, terrified, he listens to machine guns firing, grenades exploding and refugees wailing. He imagines rockets bursting through the walls or being hit by bullets. "I had never been in a place where such a thing was imaginable." When an evacuation flight is arranged, he agonizes, then takes it, and East Timor continues to burn without him.

Lloyd Parry writes as if he has failed some essential test of bravery that, say, George Orwell would have passed. Perhaps, though few would have stood fast so long. But Lloyd Parry knows that Indonesia was far more than his own personal crucible. It was the courage of ordinary Indonesians and East Timorese, not foreign journalists, that stemmed the insanity and helped transform the region. His years there were indeed a time of madness, but madness, like fear, does not last forever.

• Bryan Walsh
• In the Time of Madness recalls the mayhem, terror and excitement of Indonesia during Suharto's fall