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dwarfs; and the leader, Captain Danh, named most likely after Dan, the Old Testament prophet
who was forced into an otherworld exile, interpreted the dreams of the Babylonian king, was
protected by angels when thrown into the lions’ den, and whose name means ‘God is my
judge’ (Morris, 334), all of which fit him well, as also the role he plays as the true believer in
the cause of North Vietnam, who is yet judicious and dares to think for himself (HW, 314).
Mike Langford is confronted, like Alice and Guy Hamilton, with many doors, symbolic
of psychological or spiritual hindrances, but he finds that they are opening for him. The first
door opens when Aubrey Hardwick offers him a job at Telenews, but he does not quite explain
that what lies behind the door is the duplicitous world of espionage (HW, 90). A hidden door
lies behind a curtain of heavy red velvet in Madame Phan’s home (HW, 126). Through this
door Langford enters into the world of wisdom and riddle of the dragonlady, who acts as
Langford’s counsellor, lover, and Parvati/Durga figure. Then there is the doorway of La
Bohème, the bar/brothel on Saigon’s Tu Do street. Koch leaves it unclear just what awaits
Langford behind this door, although the street-wise children who accompany Langford
everywhere vehemently protest his entry (HW, 197), indicating the sort of grave danger Koch
associates with the ‘Otherworld’. Finally, there is the trapdoor into the underground bunker of
the North Vietnamese Army through which the Soldiers Three pass into a region of renewal,
finding that underneath the carnage of the war there are surprising forces of life waiting to re-
emerge. This proves critical to Langford, who is destined to act a saviour’s role as the forces
of evil overwhelm Southeast Asia (HW, 233).
Saigon’s Tu Do street, where ‘every second doorway seemed to be a bar’, is ‘a carnival
alley’, a degenerate 1960s amalgam of Wonderland, Rip Van Winkle’s Sleepy Hollow, and
the dual sides of the wayang kulit screen. Tu Do’s primary odours are ‘beer, urine and
perfume’, which suits the foreign soldiers filling the street in bland khakis or bright Hawaiian
shirts, who wander in the humid heat like ‘coarse and alien giants, white and black, badgered
and pursued by a race of refined, ivory-skinned gnomes who waved mutilated limbs at them,
or tried to sell them copies of Time, and Stars and Stripes’ (HW, 100). Also present in this
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