Contents
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I. MISSING
ONE - A LOCKED ROOM
TWO - THE BELLY OF THE CARP
THREE - THE DELTA
FOUR - SAIGON TEA
II - THE PEOPLE OVER THERE
ONE SURVIVORS
TWO - THE NOON HUSH
THREE - THE COMMON POT
FOUR - DREAM PAVILION
FIVE - FALL
SIX - THE BORDER
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
Acclaim for Highways to a War
“Here is a mystery that is not a mystery, an adventure that is very much more than that, a subtle unfolding of character and history camouflaged in battle-dress. Highways to a War is an absorbing portrait of lives lived at the edges of terror and beauty ... Ly Keang’s febrile vibrancy, in particular, seems to stand for everything lovely and lost in her overrun country. At the centre of it all is Mike Langford ... a hero of the kind that has become unfashionable. But Koch has endowed his creation with a soul: his disembodied voice, captured in his diary, reaches out to the reader.... Koch is a powerful writer and this is a fine book.”
—Erica Wagner, The Times (London)
“A quite outstanding novel about the Indochina War, the best I have read since Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Koch ... has brilliantly captured the mood and atmosphere of the times. He describes with almost uncanny accuracy people, places and incidents that are part of my own experience. It is a vivid, exciting and finally tragic story about a courageous man and two women, one of them French-Vietnamese, the other Cambodian, both brilliantly brought to life.”
—Richard West, Literary Review (London)
“Mike Langford ... is an obsessive idealist of the kind Koch has made his specialty: like Billy Kwan in The Year of Living Dangerously, he has the gift (or curse) of total identification ... The elder stateswoman of Franco-Vietnamese style, the lover from Battambang, the seedy secret servicemen ... have the air of characters in Greene, the compass of characters in James. The prose is so carefully tooled, you hardly notice how well it works. ... The narcotic attraction of the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia produced masterly fiction ... Christopher Koch’s magnificent new novel takes its rightful place beside these masterpieces: in its humanity and honesty, and the maturity of its storytelling, it belongs with the finest products of that sad and wasteful history.”
—Michael Hulse, The Spectator
“This is not only a pulse-pumping depiction of combat and the journalists who cover it, but such a wonderful evocation of the old Indochina that it will have many a retired war correspondent weeping into his beer.”
—Phillip Knightley, The Mail on Sunday (London) “Koch has long been regarded as one of Australia’s finest writers, praised for his sensitive use of language and meticulous attention to detail ... These qualities are abundantly apparent in this, his fifth novel.... Above all, the book is rewarding because it brings alive a world that increasingly large numbers of readers will never have experienced and which others are beginning to forget. This is the author’s most striking achievement.”
—Milton Osborne, The New York Herald Tribune
“Koch contributes powerfully to the imaginative literature of a period and place that history will ponder for generations. The book’s publication is an important event.”—Frank Devine, The Australian
PENGUIN BOOKS
HIGHWAYS TO A WAR
Christopher J. Koch is the author of several novels, including The Year of Living Dangerously, which was made into a film starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. An Australian who has both worked and traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, he currently makes his home in Tasmania.
Also by Christopher J. Koch
NOVELS
The Boys in the Island
Across the Sea Wall
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Doubleman
ESSAYS
Crossing the Gap
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books USA Inc , 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc 1995
Published in Penguin Books 1996
Copyright © Christopher J Koch, 1995 All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work offiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
“Warning” from Collected Poemsby James McAuley
“The Slowly, Slowly Poem” and “At White Deer Spring” from Pilgrim of the Clouds by Yuan Hung-tao,
translated by Jonathan Chaves.
“Myself’ by Po Chu-1, translated by L. Cranmer-Byng from A Feast of Lanterns.
”Ting The Cauldron“ from The I Chmg or Book of Changes The Richard Wilhelm translation rendered into
English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series XIX Copyright 1950, 1967, © renewed 1977 by Princeton Univer
sity Press.
Number nine of ”Seventeen Old Poems“ from Chinese Poemsedited and translated by Arthur Waley
eISBN : 978-1-101-16172-2
1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975—Fiction. 2. War photographers-Australia-Fiction.
3. War photographers-Cambodia-Fiction. 4 Missing persons—Cambodia—Fiction.
1. Title.
PR9619.3.K64H54 1995
823—dc2G 94-34603
http://us.penguingroup.com
For Cynthia Blanche, who believed in it.
For Carl and Kim Robinson and James Gerrand,
who took me to the War.
And in memory of my friend Bill Pinwill,
who did not go gentle into that good night.
Beware of the past;
Within it lie
Dark haunted pools
That lure the eye
To drown in grief or madness.
Things that are gone,
Or never were,
The Adversary
Weaves to a snare,
The mystery of sadness.
James McAuley, Warning
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is one of a related pair: a diptych. The second will follow shortly.
Each can be read without reference to the other, and each stands on its own as a story. But there are correspondences and factual links: the principal link being that Mike Langford is the illegitimate great-great-grandson of Robert Devereux, whose story is told in the second novel.
Which order the books are read in isn’t important. The order in which they’re currently appearing places the present before the past; but ultimately their sequence can be a matter of taste—depending on whether the reader prefers to see the present carrying messages from the past, or the past delivering messages to the present.
Being in battle, like being in love, is one of the fundamental human experiences, and without the many conversations I
’ve had with correspondents and cameramen who covered the war in Vietnam and Cambodia, I could not have written Highways to a War. When my characters speak of battle, it’s in the voices of these friends and acquaintances, who were unstintingly generous with their time. Many voices speak through me in this book, and I’ve tried to be faithful to them.
Among the war photographers, I owe thanks in particular to James Gerrand, David Brill, Hubert Van Es, Derek Williams and the late Yosep (Joe) Lee.
Among those former foreign correspondents whose talk has been invaluable to me, and who covered both the Indochina war and the old Southeast Asia of the sixties and seventies, I’m particularly indebted to Carl Robinson, Tim Bowden, Peter Barnett, Barry Wain, the late William Pinwill, and my brother Philip Koch.
Two authors and scholars who are experts on Cambodia were also very generous with their time and knowledge: Professor David Chandler, of Monash University, and Dr. Milton Osborne. My sincere thanks to them both.
The conflicts in Vietnam and Cambodia form the background here for a work of fiction. The characters and the events portrayed are inventions, and should be seen as such. Only the historical events are true.
Few wars have divided our society as the Vietnam War did, and these divisions are reflected among my fictitious correspondents, who range in their political opinions through the spectrum from Left to Right. None of their opinions is necessarily the author‘s—and I make no claims to any sort of wisdom about that long and bitter saga which did so much to dominate the second half of this century. 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. Those here are of a kind that I hope go beyond the fabricated questions and answers of politics, as they do in life.
In the interests of background accuracy, I’ve read as widely as possible. Two superb works on the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia respectively have never been far from my hand, and should be acknowledged: A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan, and Sideshow, by William Shawcross. I should also state my indebtedness to the correspondent Kate Webb’s remarkable book, On the Other Side—an account of her capture by the Viet Cong. This provided some valuable physical detail for the chapter The Common Pot, which principally took its inspiration from conversations I once had with the late Joe Lee, a Korean cameraman who was captured by the North Vietnamese Army while filming battle in Cambodia in 1970.
Finally, the influence and inspiration of two other books must be acknowledged: One Crowded Hour, Tim Bowden’s account of the life of the combat cameraman Neil Davis, and Page After Page, the autobiography of the cameraman and stills photographer Tim Page.
The late Neil Davis, my fellow-Tasmanian and schoolmate at Hobart High, who covered combat for a decade in Indochina, and was killed covering a minor Thai coup in 1985, may be seen by those who knew him as the model for Mike Langford. In this they will be partly right—but only partly. Mike Langford’s legend is similar to Davis‘s, and Mike carries the nickname that was once Neil’s: “the Lucky One.” But as is usually the case with characters in novels, Langford is a composite: mostly invented, and inspired as well by other war photographers—some of them friends, others men whom I’ve never met. And despite his Tasmanian origins, Langford’s family background is entirely different from Davis’s. So too are all his personal relationships, the crucial events of his life, and his eventual fate. All are essentially fictions.
There is one exception: although even here, I’m afraid, fiction has played fast and loose with fact. On the day after the fall of Saigon, Mike Langford waits inside the grounds of the Presidential Palace as Neil Davis did, to find himself filming the arrival of the first North Vietnamese tank through the gates. But Mike is taking still pictures, not shooting film, no real-life equivalent of Jim Feng was there at all, and the personal circumstances underlying this sequence are also fictitious.
Excerpts from six poems appear in the narrative.
The first, quoted by Aubrey Hardwick, is from The Widow at Windsor by Rudyard Kipling. The second, quoted by Madame Phan, comes from At White Deer Spring, by the Ming poet Yüan Hung-tao. The third, quoted by Dmitri Volkov, comes from Alexander Blok’s The Twelve. The fourth, which Jim Feng recalls, is from Arthur Waley’s translation: number nine of Seventeen Old Poems. The fifth, given to Jim Feng by Captain Nguyen Van Danh, is The Fish in Water, by the Vietnamese revolutionary poet To Huu. The sixth, quoted by Aubrey Hardwick, comes from Waiting for the Barbarians, by C. P. Cavafy.
—C.J.K.
I. MISSING
The bright moon slowly, slowly rises,
The green mountains slowly, slowly descend ...
We are low in society
in the days of our greatest health,
our pleasure comes when we are no longer young.
The Goddess of Good Luck
and the Dark Lady of Bad Luck
are with us every step we take.
YÜAN HUNG-TAO, “The Slowly, Slowly Poem,”
translated by Jonathan Chaves
ONE
A LOCKED ROOM
1.
In April 1976, my friend Michael Langford disappeared inside Cambodia. Twelve months earlier the Khmer Rouge had taken power, erasing the past and restarting the world from the beginning. We were now at the end of Year Zero.
Langford was forty years old, and at the height of his reputation as a war photographer. He’d first left Australia at the age of twenty-nine, and had spent the rest of his life in Asia. Now, it seemed, Asia had swallowed him.
The story was carried by the international media on the evening of Thursday, April 8th. I got it in advance from Rex Lockhart, who phoned me from the Launceston Courier in midafternoon.
“Mike Langford’s missing,” he said. His tone made it sound like my responsibility; but Lockhart was like that. I asked him for details, but he didn’t want to give them on the phone.
“We’ll be running it tomorrow morning,” he said. “But I think we should discuss this tonight. Come over for dinner.”
It was still light when I drove from my office to the Lockharts’ place at Trevallyn. Nowhere’s far, in Launceston, and it took me about ten minutes.
Climbing at low speed up the winding ascent to Longview Road, I glanced at the eastern hills: rim of the gray blue bowl that contains the town. There was snow on Mount Barrow, but it was perfect autumn weather, the air thin and still. At the end of the road, on the summit of the hill, I halted the car outside the Lockharts’ brown picket fence and tile-roofed garage; but I didn’t immediately get out. I wasn’t deeply worried at that stage: not consciously, at any rate. Langford had dropped out of sight before and had turned up again: he was known as a survivor.
Sunset had begun, and I sat on in the car, squinting through the windscreen against the long, slanting rays. On a latitude as far south as ours they linger for a long time, transfiguring roofs, distant roads and gold slopes of grass beyond the last suburbs: a light whose counterpart I’ve found only in Greece. Early electric lights were coming on. Launceston touched me with its smallness, as it never fails to do.
“He’s done this trick before,” Diana said. “We all started writing his obituaries that time he was wounded in Vietnam, remember? He’ll turn up.”
Rex was delayed at the paper, and she and I sat on stools on each side of the counter in the kitchen: a refuge that we often made for while one of the Lockhart Saturday night parties thundered from the living room, since we lacked the stamina to stay with the heroic drinking and singing that went on into the small hours. The counter’s top was of dark-stained Tasmanian black-wood : rather handsome, but scarred by drunken cigarettes. Diana had produced a bottle of Riesling, and I topped up our glasses. I asked her whether Rex had given her any more details about Langford than he had me.
“No,” she said. “You know what Lockhart’s like.” She generally called him Lockhart or Locko, as his friends did. “He’ll announce it all when he gets here,” she said.
She sipped her wine, the dark brown hair she still wore long hanging on each side of her face. She had on a close-fitting, jade green cashmere dress she’d probably been wearing during the day: she’d only just got home from the boutique she ran in St. John Street. I was fond of Diana, as I was of Rex. She was forty-six, and looked younger; her oval face with its strong, straight nose and transparent skin had been bequeathed by the Scots ancestors quite a few of us have in Launceston. I remembered her in her early twenties, when she was one of the most beautiful girls in town: the daughter of Angus Campbell, owner of our largest department store.
“I haven’t taken much interest in Cambodia,” she said. “What do they call it now? Kampuchea? What’s actually happening there? ”
I told her what I knew of the Khmer Rouge. “But it’s all just rumors,” I said. “No one really knows what’s going on, not even the press.”
She frowned at me. “So it really wasn’t sensible of Mike to go in there,” she said. “Why would he do it?”
I shrugged. “The story, I suppose,” I said.
I heard the back door bang, and Rex’s tread in the hall. He entered the kitchen without smiling, dropping his battered satchel on a chair, and came around the counter to kiss Diana on the cheek; then he looked at me, his arm about her shoulders. “Ray,” he said. “Glad you could come.”
Highways to a War Page 1