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considers to be the changeless ground from which the proliferating jungle that seems to be
Hinduism grows’ (Zaehner, 3). It is important for this reason to try to follow Koch’s path
through the jungle of symbols and meanings, to find the constructs he too must have
discovered in his searches, and, as a critic, to avoid imposing Orientalist or other prefabricated
interpretations or judgements on his work.
Koch is weaving together very disparate threads of both Eastern and Western traditions
in interpreting the search for self and truth in Asia. Mike Langford does not complete his
search, but the narrator comes to understand the re-creative role Dis plays in nature. Ray
Barton senses the presence of Langford’s incomplete, restless soul, haunting his old apartment
in Bangkok, waiting to be reborn. He also recognises in Mike Langford the face of Langford’s
mysterious convict great-great-grandfather, implying that it is he who had returned embodied
as Mike Langford to further his search, but having arrived again in the ‘region of Dis’, here the
Cambodian killing fields, will have to return again:
In a region of Dis beyond the Thai border, a row of crosses rises from
the paddy field’s red earth, in the motionless and terrible heat. I see flames
reach up for him, like the heat’s choking essence. But then there are other
upright poles about him, and now he’s somewhere else. (HW, 450-51)
Koch has published the prequel to Highways to a War, which is the story of that great-
great-grandfather, and has made it clear enough that the two novels together are in the Eastern
tradition of telling the series of lives of a holy man, though without promising to tie up all of
his loose threads, which could only occur at the moment of enlightenment. Each successive
life is necessary in the path of enlightenment of a soul, which is its re-identification with the
cosmic Soul. In the same way, this last, destructive age of the world, the Kali-Yuga is
indispensable to completion of the cycle before there can be a return to the holy Krta Yuga, the
first, creative age in a new cycle of time (Zimmer, 1969, 375).
12.10. Closing the Circle of Time and Place
Ray Barton remarks that Langford speaks to him from Dis, implicitly giving credence to
the possibility of Langford’s reincarnation, but also suggesting an inability to come to grips
with the gravity of the situation.
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