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12.3. The Journey into the Demonic, Sacred ‘Otherworld’
The disparate threads of Australian themes of the self, the ‘Other’, and the landscape
which C. J. Koch weaves into Asian motifs into a surprising fabric of light and dark, of the
mysterious and the familiar, of Self and ‘Other’ closely recalls the Aboriginal view of the unity
of physical and spiritual worlds and the self, and should be recognised as his most important
break with Western tradition. Koch makes the most of this theme of the ‘border country’
between realities where all of his and d’Alpuget’s protagonists tread, since, for one thing, it fits
perfectly with his leitmotif of doubleness, but, for another, it allows him to elude constraints for
linear and rational representations of reality. ‘Koch delights in the use of dichotomy and
oxymoron’, Cowie writes, ‘to produce a fascinating texture of confusion and contradiction’
with which he develops not only his characters but also his central concepts of escape, the real
world and dream fantasy (Cowie, 84). The drama he creates ‘subsists in the interaction
between the real social setting and the allegorical weight of dream and quest’ which manifests
itself in ‘a nameless inner urge towards personal completion’ in ‘vaguely possessed, non-
heroic, middle-class figures’ (Sharrad, 1984, 216). This ‘urge’ to get to the edge of the two
realities and stand in both worlds seems stronger and more central to the novels than the
principle characters themselves, with the danger being of slipping irretrievably from one’s own
world into the other.
12.3.1. The ‘Otherworld’ of the Self
Koch’s absorption in the parallel, conflicting realities stems also from his personal
experiences in the fifties as a young man who, during the voyage from Australia to Europe,
decided to disembark with two friends to travel overland the length of India. In ‘Crossing the
Gap’ Koch describes this several months’ journey which ‘was regarded as madness’ by those
companions they were leaving, as though ‘India would literally swallow us up’. Even to the
young Koch, ‘India hadn’t seemed within the bounds of the possible’, but was a land on the
edge of reality, where he reports having seen ‘the ghost’ of the British Raj still lingering some
seven years after its demise (Koch, 1987, 3-4). This experience inspired his first novel, Across
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