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A review by paul_cornelius
The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch
5.0
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.
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.