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The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Like all Koch’s novels, this is an esoteric work; that is to say, the real ‘action’ is not what it appears on the surface.

Although ostensibly the main character is Guy Hamilton, the book can be read as a dialectic between the figures of Billy Kwan (a half-Chinese dwarf who embodies the eternal restlessness of the racially mixed) and Sukarno, the populist dictator of Indonesia. Sukarno originally embodied all strands of Javanese society (Hindu, Muslim, Right and Left), but when he threw in his lot with the PKI (Communists) he came to an ignominious end, because he had lost his connection with the people. Sukarno, not Hamilton, is the real ‘giant brother’ of Billy Kwan…Kwan dies because Sukarno was dead internally.

‘The struggle of [Right and Left] never ends, because neither side is wholly good or bad,’ Koch writes. Maybe that was true in Koch’s time, but in 2020 the ‘Left’ (servants of the Davos billionaire class) do appear to have actually become evil.



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