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active qualities, as seen with Jim Feng when he, Mike Langford and Dmitri Volkov are
captured by North Vietnamese Army troops:
And I talked of the things I missed about our lost home, which I hadn’t thought
of for years. I spoke these things aloud because it gave me a sort of peace.
The past is a story, and we cannot help get back into it, so our yearning for it is
sweet and not too sharp. I wouldn’t let myself think about Lu Ying now,
because she belonged to the present, and I found this too painful. (HW, 334)
Feng also acknowledges the distinction between such remembrances, with its import of
profound reality, and hard history, whose unfiltered record often evokes only raw emotion,
when he talks about the last photo ever taken of Mike, Dmitri and him, together with Captain
Nguyen Van Danh:
There is no sadness like the sadness that fills you when you look at the faces in
such a photograph. They are not older , as they would be in life, or faded, as
they are in your memory. They are real—real all over again. And that pierces;
pierces. No; perhaps I couldn’t bear that picture. (HW, 348)
There is an element of fiction which belongs to the ‘reality’ of history. Noting the
young journalist who idolises Mike Langford, Harvey Drummond remembers how Mike had
once similarly idolised Aubrey Hardwick—a theme Koch had earlier developed with Guy
Hamilton’s admiration for the old and anachronistic Colonel Henderson in The Year of Living
Dangerously—saying that ‘legend always dwarfs reality’. Drummond calls history a ‘hall of
mirrors: reality emulating some previous legend, and then itself becoming legend, while not
quite believing it can be so—transfigured only by death’ (HW, 390-91). Donald Mills declares
the ultimate dream of spy Aubrey Hardwick is to get control of the machine which transforms
history into legend. What has driven him throughout his ruthless career, the ‘glory’ for which
he has always plotted to achieve, is to write the definitive history of the Australian intelligence
service (HW, 432). The desire for access to the most secure files and most secret facts, and
then the power to impose the spin which creates the ‘truth’ of history, would verify his
position, and his view of Australia’s position, in the world.
Dmitri Volkov is the character who most closely represents the Western idea of the
incessant, forward movement of time. He is also a student of history, especially the
philosophical history of the French and Russian revolutions, and feels the direct consequences
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