Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-year-of-living-dangerously"

The Doubleman by Christopher J. Koch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well-written and well-structured novel dealing with Tasmania, occultism, and the electric folk scene of the ‘60s. Its fictional band ‘The Rhymers’ are like a cross between Fairport Convention, The Seekers, and the Manson Family. The characters are very vivid and you get a strong sense of what they look and talk like.

The weak point of the book is the rather sinister Darcy Burr, who is clearly modelled on Koch’s perception of Charles Manson (one of his disciples is even called Pipsqueak…an obvious reference to Lynette ’Squeaky’ Fromme). But it is never clear what Burr’s real motives are! Is he interested in ‘piercing the veil’ of the sensory world, like his master Clive Broderick? Or is he merely desperate for the shallow pleasures of celebrity, to the point where he will water his music down to please record company execs?

Aside from that ambiguity, highly recommended.



View all my reviews

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.



View all my reviews