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write the fairy-tales, can also wither us and take away our present. All these
things that may be good, and may have very wonderful reasons behind them,
can’t be pursued too long (Hulse, 24).
Concerned as they are with deliberate or inadvertent passage into the ‘Otherworld’, Koch’s
novels are populated by faery-like people guarding the portals into those promising, forbidding
worlds.
Aubrey Hardwick, whose first name means ‘King of the Elves’, and whose last name
could certainly be interpreted as a derivation of the Old English wicca, giving something like
‘the stern/troublesome wizard’ (Morris, 86), is the manifestation of excessive devotion to the
dream world. His great influence on those around him begins beneficially and with
considerable clarity, and does give his protegés—particularly Mike Langford—some access to
the ‘Otherworld’, but at some point this always becomes self-deception, and Uncle Aubrey’s
invitation to his world leads to their destruction. Koch’s final analysis is that the European
myths of Fairyland ‘weren’t tales for children, but parables of warning’ (Hulse, 21), and that
spiritual health comes rather from ‘crossing the gap’, or, in other words, embracing and living
in both worlds, for, as the Brahmans assert, reality is in both.
12.8. When Worlds Collide
For Westerners, this double sense of reality has usually been limited to less serious
situations than encountered by the journalists of the novels in this study, who find themselves
at first straddling these two worlds, and are then so caught up living ‘inside things like the war
in Vietnam’ that they are paralysed. Cambodia, Harvey Drummond reports, ‘tugged at our
collective memories’, was both ‘strange yet half-known’, a hybrid of France and ‘regions
outside geography: regions that tantalized the mind, almost recalled and yet not, like a whole
mislaid life’. Even the people, ‘whose faces hinted at an antique India’, were an ‘oddly
familiar’ hybrid. The men ‘sometimes seemed more Western than Asian, and the women were
beautiful: figures from Indian frescoes’. This is the good dream of Cambodia which the
correspondents come to believe in, all the while knowing that a nightmare exists parallel to the
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