Highways to a War
By Christopher J. Koch
Minerva, 1995. 452 pp., $15.95
Reviewed by Brendan Doyle
Those who have read this Tasmanian writer's earlier novel The Year of Living Dangerously, set in Jakarta in 1965 and made into a successful film, will appreciate Koch's talent for spinning a tale around historical events and really giving the reader a feel for what it might have been like to be there.
His other novels, The Boys in the Island, Across the Sea Wall and The Doubleman, delve into more autobiographical territory, but with Highways to a War, Koch again plunges into the murky waters of politics and war, this time in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Ray, the narrator and an ABC correspondent, tells us how he learned that his old schoolmate Mike Langford, a war photographer, disappeared in Cambodia in April 1976, a year after the Khmer Rouge took power. Ray cannot believe his friend is dead and undertakes an obsessive, ultimately hopeless search for the almost mythical photographer known as "the lucky one" because he escaped so many dangerous situations.
The search begins at Clare in rural Tasmania, where Ray spent holidays with Langford in their youth. Through Ray's memories, Mike seems an unusual individual, passionate about photography but mysterious when it comes to emotions and motivation. We start to realise that the search is not only for the missing photographer but also for who he really was.
The novel goes on to describe the events leading up to Mike's disappearance, as seen through Ray's eyes, but also those of journalist Harvey Drummond and cameraman Jim Feng. Another element is the use of supposed quotes from Langford's "audio diary", cassette recordings which he kept while covering the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. This multiple perspective on "what really happened" and what made Langford tick, provides the main structure of the narration and, on the whole, it works well.
Many will see in Langford parallels with Neil Davis, fellow Tasmanian and schoolmate of Koch, who was killed covering a Thai coup in 1985. But as Koch writes in his preface, "fiction has played fast and loose with fact". Langford is in fact a composite of the many cameramen and correspondents Koch spoke to, including James Gerrand and Tim Bowden.
The story proper begins in Saigon, 1965, where Langford has been sent to cover the intensifying war in Vietnam. Koch vividly evokes the world of jaded western journalists, the boredom and routine of their lives drinking on hotel terraces, livened up occasionally by a Vietcong bomb going off in a bar somewhere.
These men, by-products of US imperialism's intervention in south-east Asia, have little feeling or respect for the Vietnamese people. Langford is different. He make personal friends of a South Vietnamese army commander, and he falls in love with a young crippled woman in Cholon, sending her overseas for an operation.
She mysteriously disappears on her return to Saigon, and Langford, heartbroken, suspects she has been sold into prostitution by an "uncle". We then follow Langford's coverage of the war from the front line.
The second half of the book is set in Cambodia. There are nightmarish scenes as the Khmer Rouge close in on Phnom Penh and correspondents go to the front in taxis, sometimes never to return.
On one occasion, Langford and three colleagues fall into the hands of North Vietnamese soldiers who take them for CIA spies. Under the orders of Captain Danh, they are taken through Khmer Rouge territory and end up sharing a few weeks of life holed up in tunnels with the NVA fighters before finally being released to make their own way back to Phnom Penh. There is much ironic humour here, with Langford, admirer of the ARVN, coming to appreciate the idealism and humaneness of his communist hosts.
Langford responds to individuals and cares little for ideas. In the book's preface, Koch writes: "A novelist's commitment, in my view, should not be to the prescriptions of ideology, but to the conflicts and ethical dilemmas that grip his characters". Indeed, Langford ends up taking up a gun and fighting for the Free Khmer forces, after falling in love with Ly Keang, daughter of a military commander.
In a recent TV interview, Koch said the main premise of the book was the question "What if a war photographer failed to shut off his feelings?". Although we can only judge from others' accounts and his diary entries, Langford appears as a man who cannot prevent himself from getting involved in life-and-death struggles, who cannot remain the indifferent observer is demanded by his job.
Highways to a War is also a portrait of someone addicted to the adrenalin rush of battle. Here I had a bit of a problem with the book: there is an element of celebration of war, of macho values. "Being in battle, like being in love, is one of the fundamental human experiences", writes Koch in the preface. And the book does focus very much on the danger and excitement. There is a curious lack of emotional description, as well as a strange prudishness when it comes to sex or sensuality.
This reservation aside, I enjoyed this spell-binding re-creation of a unique period of history as lived by a courageous observer who ultimately became one of its victims.