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Western cultural myths and revitalising them with parallel but living myths from the East, in
order to re-enchant the West with a vital mythological culture in texts which, as symbolic if not
sacred, the contemporary reader can receive with a degree of heuristic interpretation.
Koch is clearly trying to reach back to the initial, literal ‘meaning’ of his pretexts in spite
of the huge cultural and historical gap which has opened, and not just since the classical Indian
era but even since the glory days of the British Empire, because in the West they no longer
have ‘significance’. Koch becomes the poet of a new mythology, and then encourages the
reader to discover the significance by constructing multiple hierarchies of hermeneutic and
heuristic interpretations of ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’. Cookie, for example, recites the
prayer of the dalang puppet master of the wayang kulit shadow theatre, asking heaven and
earth for the inspiration to recount not only a mundane story of Australian expatriates but the
sacred tale of the spiritual battle for the soul; Billy Kwan, from his towering perch up on the
tall bar stool or the desktop, lectures on the philosophies of East and West, and invokes the
Javanese spirits, first to teach Guy Hamilton but later to discover for himself the truths of self
and soul; and in the manner of the dalang, the wayang puppet master who interprets the canon
of heroic and magical plays of the sacred Javanese shadow theatre, President Sukarno subtly
refashions the scripts of sacred wayang plays performed at his mythical palace in the cool
mountains to reveal the shifts in turbulent Indonesian political power to his nervous ministers.
Kwan’s journey of self-discovery, likewise, demands the heuristic accompaniment of the
reader, who Koch leads like Alice down the rabbit hole, armed with an array of powerful
mythological symbols and metaphors. Sent through the labyrinth of Kwan’s thoughts, actions,
and death, the reader is finally forced into the position of interpreting, in terms of his own
socio-cultural environment, Kwan’s motives, psychological state, and, ultimately, success
and/or failure.
D’Alpuget’s task is of another kind, but no less daunting. She first entices her
readership into psychological identity with her protagonists in what begin like the stereotypical
romance/adventures about the East which Roskies discusses. She shows the reader Asia’s
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