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Indian literature, he would be able to describe the aeons of bliss with Ly Keang in the heavens
in the sequel to Highways to a War, and which would then be succeeded by reincarnation, on
and on. Koch and Langford are, however, more interested in the past. Yet, Adrian Mitchell
points out how the epigraph to the novel, James McAuley’s ‘Warning’, cautioning against
trying to accommodate the past, might be especially relevant to the role of Ly Keang, who
draws Langford back into Cambodia and to his death. Keang embodies for Langford ‘the
charm and mystery of Cambodia, the novel’s Otherland’, and, though he might be guilty of
trying to get back into the past, Mitchell finds it ‘readily comprehensible, even admirable, that
he should step away from the sensible, the realistic, and chase after his heart’s yearning’. ‘The
incompleteness of the ending leads to pathos, not tragedy: the sorrows of mankind, not the
inexorable moral law, are what this story encapsulates’ (Mitchell, 1996, Ancestral Voices, 8).
While Langford’s ghost does not find peace at the end of the novel, and this due to the
fact that the demons have not yet been returned to their place in dharma, one must feel that his
relationship with Keang was never meant to be fulfilled in this life. One bit of evidence of
what Koch is leaving unworked is in Harvey Drummond’s assessment that, for Langford,
‘Saigon was the past’, ‘Phnom Penh was the present, and Ly Keang was the future’ (HW, 400).
The trouble is that Phnom Penh’s falling to the ‘Black Ghosts’ is Koch’s representation of the
beginning of the end of time.
Symbols of water, the apsarasas are naturally shape-changers. Langford notices when
Keang first comes to him how Keang’s presence can even change the shapes of things around
her: ‘In the half-dark, I was looking at a woman I’d never seen before. Beautiful: so beautiful.
She’d changed everything around her, making the air in the room seem to sing.’ Like the
apsarasas, who are fond of dice and give luck to whom they favour, Keang becomes the
source of Langford’s good luck. First, she notices the Lakshmi icon in his apartment, stopping
‘in front of my big Khmer sandstone sculpture of the Goddess of Fortune: the best piece I have.
This is a nice Lakshmi, she said, and looked at me over her shoulder.’ She notices that the
Lakshmi has lost an arm, a sign of lost strength in Indian symbolic terms. Still, this seems to
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