C. J. Koch (1932–2013)

Genre: Historical Fiction
What I really liked: Short
Me as a human, have never been interested in politics. That already keeps me away from books about politics. ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ is historical fiction with Indonesian politics as a central theme. Yet, this book held my attention with its writing style. I could very easily relate with the Hindu Gods that have been mentioned. It was a unique style of comparing & contrasting characters with Gods based on traits. This is the first time I read a book with a dwarf as the main character. It was so refreshing and very different than the things already known and perceived.
There were multiple instances where I was little lost concerning chapters. I would have found my way back easier if the chapters had names.
Overall a good read- it made it to my list of “different and tried”


… (mer)

Update 11 April 2019: reread this novel for the second time in less than a year. It still stands apart, a strong rendering of a very personalized look at the wars in Southeast Asia during the Sixties and Seventies.

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Imaginative, this book about a quest to discover the fate of Mike Langford, an Australian journalist who has disappeared into Cambodia after the fall of the country to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Told through multiple points of view, Highways to a War operates a bit like a literary version of Citizen Kane. Beginning with Langford's childhood friend, Ray Barton, who has been tasked with tracking down Langford's whereabouts, you discover the boy behind the man in the harsh farmlands of Tasmania. The loss of a family and an early love serve as Langford's "Rosebud," the tangible childhood memory that gave insight into Charles Foster Kane's obsession to control people and possess things.

Yet Langford is someone who possesses virtually nothing materialistically and who devotes himself to idealistic causes often dismissed by other Western journalists and officials, from the down and out Singaporeans living and working on the city's wharves to the dismissed and unseen soldiers of the South Vietnamese army. Later, he takes up the cause of the Free Cambodian remnants who once backed Lon Nol but who become exiled to the fringes of the Thai-Cambodian border after the Khmer Rouge take over the country and institute a reign of terror. All the while, he has fallen for the seductions of a Vietnamese "dragon lady" at one point and a revenge minded Cambodian patriot who has lost her father to the Khmer Rouge a little while later.

The book is masterful at weaving the wars in Indochina into its landscape. And it has an epic feel to it, going from Tasmania to Singapore in the early 1960s, then to Saigon in 1965, Bangkok in 1976, and then back to Phnom Penh in 1973. But the reader will need to be somewhat familiar with the details and history of that time, for some of it is taken for granted--even though the novel was published in 1995. And this may be why the book has remained relatively obscure, unlike Koch's best known work, The Year of Living Dangrously, which also dealt with roughly the same time period in a more focused manner. Highways to a War was written for the generation that lived and knew the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide. Being a work of the mid 1990s, its readership was being replaced by a younger generation or a society that had turned its back on the turmoil of Southeast Asia in the 1960s-1970s and focused on the good times of the 1990s. Koch's novel was caught between then and right before the beginning of the terror wars of the twenty-first century.

It's a pity. Because this novel is superior in almost every way to other works on the wars in Southeast Asia. Its formal exploration of Langford from the differing perspectives of his closest friends, however, never leaves us with a full picture of the man. We see him from the view of his childhood best friend, his two fellow cameramen, and a close reporter friend. We even see him from his own confidences recorded into a tape recorder instead of a written diary. But there is still a mystery to him at the end. Why? Maybe because we never actually encounter Langford directly. And maybe because despite all the revelations about him, his ultimate motivations remain repressed in his own thoughts and memories. Much like Charles Foster Kane.

*Based upon the life of Australian cameraman and war correspondent Neil Davis, who was killed during a Bangkok coup attempt in 1985.… (mer)

We tend to mark the passage of time more in decades than years. Something about a larger number of days, months, and years gives us perspective. But some decades become lost. In the twentieth century, that is true, I think, for the 1920s and 1970s (and it may become true for the 1990s). The preceding and following decades tended to nibble into both the 1920s and 1970s. Like the 1920s and the aftermath of World War I, the first few years of the 1970s dealt with a lingering war, Vietnam, that had impacted not just the United States and Southeast Asia but the world at large. And like the 1920s again, with the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, the last year of the 1970s slipped back into a renewal of the Cold War leading to the ultimate demise of Communism in Eastern Europe and Russia. The 1970s, it seems actually existed for but a small span of time, for three or four years from 1975 to 1979. And right in the middle of them appeared Christopher J. Koch's novel, The Year of Living Dangerously.

Koch seems to realize he has managed to place his narrative in a unique time. Part of that is brought about through the skillful use of a narrator, "Cookie" (Koch himself). Why skillful? Because the setting of the story is 1965 Indonesia, during the last year of Sukarno's dictatorship. To tell it solely from that viewpoint would have made it too immediate. And the story needs distance. After all, it is told in a semi-nostalgic tone, which is also loaded with the wisdom of age and its accompanying skepticism rather than youthful disillusionment and cynicism. The 13 year gap provides that, as does shifting the point of view of the story from Guy Hamilton, the Australian journalist at the middle of it all, to Hamilton's friend and confidante, Cookie. It is all of a time with its particular era, because the late 1970s, or the "true 1970s," themselves reflected that same exhaustion and skepticism towards anything other than the personal in life.

That is the real story of The Year of Living Dangerously, the exit of the West from Asia, the knowledge that especially Southeast Asia would always have an unknowable quality that Westerners could never understand. Ever. Hamilton depicts that perfectly. His still lingering schoolboy character is built on the echoes of empire and Kipling. His desire to escape the humdrum existence of suburban Australia reflected in his reading of W. Somerset Maugham. And his thirst for adventure and danger in the novels of Ian Fleming's James Bond. These are the books that dominate his bookshelves. And probably the James Bond movies should be included, too. After all, when Hamilton is menacingly held underwater at a mountain top resort pool by a Russian agent, Vera, it is awfully reminiscent of Bambi and Thumper's attack on Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever, which, by the way, just happened to be directed by Guy Hamilton.

At book's end, Koch's Guy Hamilton is ejected from Asia altogether. Left physically scared, he holds Asia as his true "home." But it can't be. As is also made clear towards the end, Hamilton belongs to a tradition rooted in the Aegean and flourishing in even further northern climes. Yes, there is clearly something of the dark and light of the Indonesian shadow puppet show in the clash between the two cultures. A hope for a merging of the Christian and the socialist, the Hindu and the Muslim, and perhaps East with West, as Hamilton's own puppet master, the dwarf, Billy Kwan, held out for. But that is a hope. I think it was Koch's hope. I am not sure, however, that his character, Hamilton, could ever really achieve that home any more than the rest of us Westerners living in Southeast Asia.… (mer)