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ealm distinguished by reversals of natural order, where dreams have priority over the material,
and where the forces of chaos and adharma reign.
Harvey Drummond describes Phnom Penh as a theatre when he and Dmitri Volkov ride
a cyclo out into the night:
Here were the actors, just as I remembered them: monkey peddlers, kerbside
dentists, soothsayers, cigarette makers, dark-faced Khmer hawkers squatting
beside braziers, pale-faced Chinese shopkeepers in their doorways, and the
beautiful, full-bodied women with their warm, Sino-Indian faces.
Phnom Penh is no longer part of the real world, Drummond concludes, but remains frozen in
time, ‘and the thing that was gathering in the countryside could perhaps be ignored’. He
cannot, however, ignore the half-naked children he sees dodging about under the streetlamps.
He thinks they are playing games until he sees ‘that they were catching insects that swarmed in
the light, and putting them into jars for food’ (HW, 244-45). As the population comes to rely
on Koch’s symbol of soullessness for sustenance, the Cambodian Army, never steadfastly in
the real world, slips ever more into the dream world. When the Soldiers Three are released by
the NVA their first contact with the Cambodians is with a chimerical army. Feng reports how
some four hundred metres away, where the road ran into blue hills on the
horizon, were a group of military trucks and armoured personal carriers, with
soldiers standing beside them. We stopped, and narrowed our eyes in the heat:
a shimmer rose for the bitumen, and the soldiers and vehicles seemed to
dissolve and re-form in the air, like a dream. They didn’t seem to see us. (HW,
354-55)
During the Soldier’s Three capture, they descend into the rabbit-hole underground
bunker of the NVA, finding it warm, dry and full of human brightness, while outside it is wet,
dark and threatening. Another entry into the looking-glass dream world is made on couscous
night at the Jade Pagoda, ‘A mutual therapy session for emotionally dislocated corespondents.
A station for the dressing of psychic wounds. A trapdoor into trance’ (HW, 233). Trapdoors
can often only be opened from one direction, and the journey into Dis is proving ever more
dangerous. Langford’s Saigon children understand this when they see him heading for the
bar/brothel called La Bohème. This recalls Billy Kwan’s dossier comment, about Guy
Hamilton’s relationship with the mysterious Vera Chostiakov, of ‘the invasion of Durga’s
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