The Year of Living Dangerously, Christopher Koch's novel about an Australian journalist in 1960s Indonesia
Christopher Koch's tale of a tyro journalist in Indonesia in the build-up to a military coup, The Year of Living Dangerously evokes brilliantly a treacherous time.
The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher Koch, pub. HarperCollins
Koch used to state rather forcefully that he had written several other books, and that he considered some of them better. Protest though he might, it is the tale of the tyro Australian journalist battling the jungles of Indonesian politics in the mid-1960s that people remember.
The protagonist, Guy Hamilton, is loosely based on Koch's younger brother, Philip, a reporter for Australian broadcaster ABC, and the book took its title from a favourite phrase of then Indonesian president Sukarno, whose pugnacious attitude to running his country earned him many enemies.
The book's constant evocation of danger is enthralling: it's one thing to find yourself in a dangerous situation, quite another to enter it on purpose. To then deliberately return to it, as Hamilton does with a civil war imminent, makes for a compelling narrative.
Naturally, there's a love interest, in the shape of British diplomat Jill Bryant, an intelligence operative who's well placed to pass Hamilton scoops when it suits her. However, her character is one-dimensional when compared to Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian dwarf who works as a photojournalist and acts as the book's unofficial chorus. It's the well-connected, moral and thoughtful Kwan who introduces Hamilton to important contacts, who acts as harbinger for the forthcoming conflict, and who unconsciously highlights the plight of the disabled in a country where so many are disadvantaged.
