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lecher who dares the demonic prostitutes to get him when he takes Hamilton to the cemetery
(YLD, 179), shouting at Hamilton in terms of the thin screen separating the two worlds of the
wayang kulit to roll his window up to keep them out (YLD, 196). Finally, ‘furiously hunting
some sort of destruction’, Curtis disappears into the hell of the burgeoning war in Vietnam
(YLD, 182-83).
Koch applies this dehumanisation to his variations on the Australian themes of the clash
of antagonistic worlds and the search for paradise. Cookie has only one photograph of the
group of correspondents. Taken by Kwan, it shows Hamilton and Cookie pedalling tricycle-
rickshas which they have taken over from the betjak boys in Jalan Thamrin. Cookie’s
passenger is ‘Great Wally, hands on monumental knees, chins held high, looking, in his
straining tropical suit, like a figure from the remote Far-Eastern era of Hamilton’s nostalgia: a
Somerset Maugham character, perhaps’. Hamilton is pedalling ‘Kevin Condon, whose
sheepish smile is that of a good schoolboy who knows he should not be here’. The ‘dog-eared
photograph’, lending attention to two directions at once, shows Cookie ‘not just our lost
charade, but Indonesia’s double face: its enormous hopelessness; its queer jauntiness’ (YLD,
58). It enables Cookie to step back in time, and, guided by his imagination, to flip
nostalgically through the layers of masks of the characters as to Indonesia itself.
Koch has in all of his novels interwoven the themes of the wearing of masks and of the
search for an idealised world. Sharrad writes that the ‘balance between ideal and illusion,
enchantment and reality is a delicate one, and Koch’s protagonists are often exercised trying to
bring together the elusive power of dream and the compelling weight of the everyday world’
(Sharrad, 1985, 66). And yet, they and the other characters are also often doing just the
opposite. Koch parallels the destructive effects of donning masks of personality with those of
searching for a paradise in the natural, i.e. the illusory, world, saying that by making ‘illusions
more important than reality, you will be drained of vitality; you will lose your ability to live’
(Thieme, 1986, 22).
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