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to him. Alison Broinowski would agree that Christopher Koch stands firmly behind the
judgement of Cookie, his likely mouthpiece. She affirms that Koch concurs with such of his
intellectual forebears as Rudyard Kipling who have seen such decadence as proof of the
decline of Western society (Broinowski, 1992, 178). The irony is that Asia, where Australia is
hoping to clarify questions about its identity, has always born the Orientalist stereotype as
where even—perhaps especially—the most degenerate of Westerners can finally be
themselves.
5.7. Koch’s Two Enigmatic Alices
Koch substantiates this theme of moral degeneracy in physical form by fashioning his
Alice type as two characters who have separate backgrounds, personalities and destinies, but
jointly make up a composite protagonist. Billy Kwan and Guy Hamilton are each terribly
incomplete and incapable of taking lead roles in the events of the plot, but together they
become a unified heroic figure. This identity puzzle is itself a dual image out of Lewis
Carroll’s Alice books and the wayang kulit’s representation of the three Pandava brothers,
Arjuna, Judistira and Bima, who epitomise an Eastern version of the separate elements of a
whole personality. This section limits itself to Kwan and Hamilton’s labyrinthine Alice
connection; the complex Eastern associations of this double character are investigated in
chapter 11.
5.7.1. Billy Kwan
The search for lost identity is a special problem for Billy Kwan, who has as much
trouble keeping track of who he is as does Alice. Kwan, indeed, is a shape changer. The
narrator seems to be describing one of the chessmen in Through the Looking-Glass, when he
says: ‘His black, crew-cut head appeared large in relation to his body, and his legs were
comically brief; but his chest and shoulders were powerful, and his hands square and capable-
looking.’ He sounds like Humpty Dumpty on the wall when he ‘perched himself with some
precariousness on a high bamboo stool and crossed one stumpy leg over the other’. Then he
becomes the Cheshire Cat, with his head separating from his body and dissolving into a
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