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darkness in you: she who turns time into sleep …’ (YLD, 178). Langford similarly goes like
Rip Van Winkle to drink the liquor which gives entry into the land of dream, to escape the real
world where his friend, the South Vietnamese Captain Trung, has been killed in action. The
children desperately implore him not to disappear into the bar. They have the most to lose
should he not return from a visit to a place he typically would avoid. Langford’s fate is set,
however, and he is destined to continue on.
The Land of Dis is like a black hole, progressively absorbing more people and land into
it. All of Southeast Asia is being drawn into it, and when it takes Volkov and Ly Keang, Mike
Langford is also irretrievably lost. He knows when he re-enters the forbidden Cambodia of the
Khmer Rouge that he will have no real chance to get out, but he also grasps that only in
Cambodia can he find his own self.
12.7. The Land of Faery
Attaining oneness with the transcendental Self is the goal of all Eastern ascetic
endeavours, but can only be achieved through obliteration of the phenomenal self—hardly a
useful symbol for an Australian writer like Koch, for whom the ‘otherland’ (his earliest term
for the concept which appears in his 1979-revised Boys in the Island) refers ‘to all the
possibilities of the self which lie somewhere in the past of childhood or remain in the future
over the horizon’ (Thieme, 1987, 454). Alongside the Eastern mythology, therefore, Koch sets
the Western, which offers a transitional world between those of the ‘real’ and the
‘imagination’. The green world of elves and faeries is Koch’s door to the ‘Otherworld’. Koch
explains his handle on the faery myth: ‘Fairyland is enchanting: it may well be a glimpse of
paradise—for which we all long. Fairyland has been seen by the Irish in particular as a
halfway region between Heaven and this world’, and therefore may have the power to bring
‘the other world within reach’ (Hulse, 22). Entry is not without its risks. ‘The things that are
most desirable can sometimes lead to our destruction’, Koch says. The very freshness and
intensity of childhood
becomes a trap if we wish to prolong it. Love that is lost, if we try to cling to
it, will destroy us. Mourning too long for the dead, as the people knew who
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