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In a vital note, tucked away at the very end of “The Tea Lords,” author Hella S. Haasse states that the book “is a novel, but it is not ‘fiction.’ ”

History books often focus on the big figures — princes, revolutionaries, governors and generals — and leave the lives of the bit players to writers of historical fiction. “The Tea Lords,” straddling the strange gap between these genres, focuses on the “side-lights” of Indonesia’s colonial past — the lives, loves and losses of a dynasty of Dutch tea planters in the uplands of West Java.

Haasse is the grande dame of Dutch literature. Now 92, she was born in Batavia (the old Dutch name for Jakarta) and spent the first two decades of her life in what was then the Dutch East Indies. During a 60-year career she has written many novels, some drawing on her own background in Indonesia. But in “The Tea Lords” she has done something different.

The book — originally published in Dutch in 1992, but only now available in a crisp English translation by Ina Rilke — spans the lifetime of Rudolf Kerkhoven, scion of an established family of planters in Java. The book opens with the young, idealistic and ambitious Kerkhoven completing his studies in Holland in the 1860s and returning to Java to be inducted into the mysteries of the tea trade. But the core of the story lies in his struggles to establish his own remote plantation, Gamboeng, in the damp uplands south of Bandung, and in his marriage to Jenny, a member of another Dutch dynasty in Java.

All this makes for the bones of a conventional family saga — and indeed, that is how “The Tea Lords” is arranged, with a web of cousins and uncles stretched over the green Javanese mountainsides, bound together through sibling rivalry, overbearing patriarchs and dark secrets.

But Haasse did not simply invent these people. A real man named Rudolf Kerkhoven, who did found a plantation at Gamboeng (tea is still grown in the area today), married a woman named Jenny, and the book is driven by large excerpts from their actual letters and journals. This unique approach, at times, makes “The Tea Lords” a frustrating read.

In her afterword, Haasse notes that the quotations have not been invented; rather they have been “arranged to meet the demands of a novel.” But this can lead to confusion — how much has the author meddled with the chronology? How often has she edited verbatim excerpts?

In its attempts to combine aspects of both fiction and non-fiction, the book sometimes stumbles. Passages about the technicalities of tea growing and the backgrounds of the main families, which in a history book could have been comfortably described, become long bouts of exposition forced into the mouths of the characters. Thoughts and emotions, hinted at in the original letters, take a strangely flat tone when Haasse expands upon them, and the blurring of the line between real quotations and invented dialogue often leaves the drive of the narrative hidden behind a mist of ambiguity. It’s hard not to feel that “The Tea Lords” would have been stronger as pure fiction or pure history.

But despite this, the disjointed strangeness of the book’s structure manages — perhaps unintentionally — to convey the disjointed strangeness of the lives it depicts. Whole generations of Dutch men and women — like the characters in this book — were conditioned to think of a far-off Holland as “home” while living out most of their lives on some steamy plantation in Java. They did not consider themselves the active agents of colonialism that we might regard them as now, and in detailing their private concerns, petty arguments and fears, Haasse conveys this idea convincingly. It is unfortunate that the Indonesians who feature in the book are little more than crude caricatures of loyal retainers and devoted maids, but the author didn’t have their diaries to draw from, so this was probably inevitable.

The greatest strength of “The Tea Lords” comes from its atmosphere. If the conversations are sometimes stilted, the descriptions of the landscapes are anything but. A powerful sense of the sheer, overwhelming greenness of the Javanese countryside pervades the book. The portrayal of Jenny Kerkhoven’s fears, frustrations and eventual descent into madness, meanwhile, offers an unsettling glimpse into the darker currents running beneath the colonial social scene.

In its final third, the book subtly changes pace. Haasse begins to quote ever larger chunks from the archives, often without bothering to embed them in her own prose. Yet as the 20th century opens and the key characters move toward old age, they suddenly take stronger shape and become more sympathetic as the terrible toll that plantation life has taken on their relationships and happiness becomes clear.

The book’s unusual nature does, at times, make it a difficult read, and some may well be left with many questions. But by the time the book reaches its quietly sad closing scene — in the cool, green forest of Gamboeng — it no longer really matters whether it is truth or fiction.