Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

And yet, Cookie describes the Wayang Bar for its ‘artificially heightened good fellowship’ and
its resemblance to the Shadow Theatre from which it got its name, repeatedly making it clear
that the wearing of masks does not end at the entrance to the Wayang Bar.
Cookie claims to dislike his father-confessor role, and says it is simply his being a
lapsed Catholic with good listening habits which makes him fit the part. There is, however, a
need for someone to wear a father-figure mask among the Wayang colleagues, whose
‘isolation from normal life and the day-to-day uncertainty of their position prompted them to
self-revelation’ in the Wayang, ‘with its changeless red candles flickering at intervals around
the black mirror-surface of the bar’—the wayang kulit ambience which seems to Cookie an
appropriate ‘confession-box’ (YLD, 57). Cookie then waits some ten years, time to remove the
masks he would have been wearing in the heat of the moment and assume with relish the mask
of the wayang kulit’s dalang, which allows him to assemble from a hilltop farm in dry, cool,
southeast Australia the story of Billy Kwan and Guy Hamilton’s search for soul and self and
paradise.
Paradise, of course, is not a place, but is the state of the perfectly unmasked soul.
Koch’s protagonists pursue paradise fully ignorant of this, however, and this is especially
dangerous in the environment of the cataclysm of Southeast Asia of the 1960s. One might be
led to look for a paradise in drugs, which Koch called ‘a way of trying to get a visionary
experience on the cheap’ (Thieme, 1986, 21), and which he deals with in many scenes, though
perhaps more succinctly in Highways to a War when Mike Langford is accosted by his street
children begging him not to go into the La Bohème opium bar to seek release from the pain of
the war (HW, 197). The clique of journalists have long, orgiastic feasts with drug spiced foods.
Such experiences, which represent for them the best of times in old Phnom Penh, are, however,
inevitably dehumanising, as Koch shows when the irascible but eloquent Trever Griffiths
appears to Harvey Drummond with a horrifying mask. His ‘dark eyes shine and insist in the
old way, and his paper-white face works with the old inner fury. But as I watch, his face
becomes a huge Assyrian mask, with glossy black beard and ringlets, filling my vision.’ It is
- 243 -