Spies in the Shadows: Intelligence and Secret Agents in the Novels of Christopher Koch

Abstract

FROM THE DAYS OF THE COLD WAR, THE WORLD OF THE SPY HAS GENERATED AN EXTRAordinary level of imaginative interest as evidenced in literature and film. Widely various, examples range the sophisticated glamor and simplistic heroism of James Bond to the unresolved ethical intricacies of Graham Greene to the unrelenting negative realism of John Le Carre. Bruce Bennett, who has made invaluable contributions to this area of study, notes that Australian writers of spy fiction are comparatively few, despite the country's lengthy historical engagement in espionage (The Spying Game 4). Within this canon however, novelists strive to establish a genre that is distinct the spy thrillers over which, as Bennett notes, Britain effectively exerts the rights of ownership (4). Australian authors write from the outside (147). Christopher Koch has made significant contributions to Australian spy fiction. In The Year of Living Dangerously (1978), Highways to a War (1995), Out of Ireland (1999), and The Memory Room (2007) Koch extends the paradigms of doubleness and the twining of dualities that are recurrent across other aspects of his work. Where before this doubleness was revealed through the presence of Faery or what critics refer to as Otherland (Henricksen 62) within the mundane or in the double vision induced by postcolonialism, in spy fiction perpetual conflicts rage that are quite distinct those wrought by international politics. Not only are the identities of the spies doubled, realist perspectives are placed in contestation with the fantastical and heroic elements often associated with spy fiction. Similarly, espionage is a clandestine but routine and often monotonous activity that simultaneously evokes something primal in the human psyche. Most often, these instincts are precisely the opposite of what is required. They take the form of a desire for power, a longing for the truth or for various forms of secret knowledge, irate paranoia, or simply an over-stimulation of the imagination. Koch uses these conjunctions of opposites to examine the allure wielded by espionage and its premises and to counterbalance its manifestations. This paper tracks the progress of this examination through various characterizations and plot events. In nearly all cases, the allure generated by espionage, which often rises from, but is not limited to, images of the kind associated with popular culture, is more destructive than the machinations of actual espionage. Yet the two worlds remain simultaneously mutually exclusive and inextricably twined. Koch's work, it is continually emphasized that the examination of espionage is the examination of doubleness. Koch thereby offers a layered approach largely unexamined by many British writers in this field and one that is fitting for an Australian author not displacing the writing of an ancestral country but crisscrossing and doubling the spy genres of Britain with alternate perspectives. TheThe Year of Living Dangerously explores the ethics of various forms of information gathering including the various forays of professional journalists and the efforts of one idiosyncratic individual to keep detailed, ever-expanding files on the personal lives of others. However, only one professional spy is prominent in the novel. The novel is set in Indonesia during one of the most turbulent periods in the country's history. The coup in 1965 was mounted by the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), who at the time controlled the largest communist organization in any non-communist state (Hindley 237), in order to displace President Sukarno. However, the future president, Suharto, led the military to rout the coup. The coup was then transformed into a conservative counter-coup and, in the following six months, half a million leftists, real or imagined, were slaughtered by the military and local gangs (Gee). In historical circles, speculation swirls around a secret consignment of arms that was allegedly dispatched China to the PKI in Jakarta. …