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There was no sexual interest to be read in their faces; and they did not
smile. yet I had never seen a couple who seemed more inevitably intended for
sexual linking. They looked cooler than the rest of us: she in a pale blue dress
of some sort of linen; the big man in one of his innumerable safari suits. Dark
and fair in their lit frame, they had ceased for a moment to be themselves, and
resembled the human shadows of universal wish. (YLD, 103)
In drawing on his many metaphors and symbols from East and West, Koch is working out his
ideas on that ‘universal wish’. He says that all of his novels, including The Boys in the Island
and Doubleman as also Across the Sea Wall, The Year of Living Dangerously, and Highways to
a War, involve the search for ‘a region of the imagination that doesn’t exist in this world’, but
which one half-remembers from childhood and carries into adult life, a theme Koch admits he
may have first encountered in Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” (Hulse, 18). Guy
Hamilton’s desire to rediscover the imperial Asia of his father; Billy Kwan’s preoccupation
with dwarves, spirits and avatars; Robert O’Brien’s urge to let himself be shaken out of his
conventional life; these are all images of the ‘universal wish’ for some ‘re-enchantment’ of the
sort David Tacey writes about. Even the landscape, Koch says, shares this wish and ‘is waiting
for something to happen’ (Hulse, 18).
Also like Tacey, who mentions the ill-directed efforts of many to find a new sense of
spirituality in bogus New Age philosophies, Koch is concerned with the excess that comes
with the West’s preoccupation with illusion. The Western world, he believes, is ‘ensnared by
illusion’ fed it in film, television, and literature. Koch says that this is ‘perhaps inevitable in a
society that’s lost its central belief-system’ (Hulse, 21), leading to a self-centered
‘masturbatory society’ (Hulse, 22). The problem is not so much with the world of imagination
and illusion, which Koch presents positively, as in his metaphors of the hop fields at Clare
farm and in the NVA bunker, but in the delusion which comes from a ‘permanent attraction to
illusion’ (Hulse, 23). ‘Devotion to illusion and obsession with the past, as well as belief in
magic as a force to influence and control and dominate other minds, all lead to psychic ill-
health and disaster’ he says (Hulse, 23). Examples to this are ubiquitous in Koch’s novels.
The principle ones include Robert O’Brien’s physical breakdown following his
emotional/spiritual disappointment; Billy Kwan’s disillusion when he realises that his heroes
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