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13.5. The Wheel of Time Whirls out of Control
As discussed in chapter 8, the turn of the wheel of time inevitably determines as part of
the dharmic order the rise and fall of heroes and malefactors. The problem is that when the
demons usurp the rule of the universe, even the cycle of time itself is threatened by the chaos
of adharma. This threat is manifested in the ubiquitous images of time out-of-joint in
Highways to a War. Mike Langford, who is said to remain ‘in the 1950s’ since he slicks his
hair down with Brylcreem (HW, 161), wakes up from the dysenteric delirium he suffers early
after his arrival in Asia, and finds himself in ‘Singapore of the 1930s’ (HW, 87). The
Cambodian Army he accompanies into battle, brave but poorly led soldiers who are equipped
with outmoded U.S. and French army surplus weapons, and slaughtered by the Viet Cong and
Khmer Rouge, is said to ‘operate as though it’s in the Middle Ages: they haven’t had a serious
war since then’ (HW, 224). Westerners see the sexual mores of the Cambodian middle class as
proof that it is ‘the nineteenth century here’ (HW, 266). Relics of Empire keep turning up, as
the oil lamp at Madame Delphine’s opium den, a symbolic source of light and heat surrounded
by the burgeoning darkness, an ‘antique: a lamp from the nineteenth century, still burning here
in Asia’ (HW, 280). Claudine Phan’s Saigon home is ‘formal and imposing’ but has ‘a sense
of dustiness’, with ‘dim and grimy’ walls, stuffy air, and seems not to have been changed since
the thirties, all of which gives it ‘an air of being stuck in time’ (HW, 402).
Southeast Asia is in the quiet, shrinking eye of the strengthening demonic storm, and the
Australians posted there feel the threat more than all others. Other Westerners can pull up their
stakes and head home before the storm hits, but the Aussis have always expected to be left
behind. Aubrey Hardwick, sounding like Guy Hamilton before him, laments the end of the era
of British imperial rule as only an Australian can: ‘The most successful empire since Rome’s:
finally gone. And Australia naked: our shield in Asia taken away.’ He says that the British
built Singapore ‘out of a swamp, and brought British freedom and justice to the eastern seas’.
Hardwick invokes Kipling, and says Mike Langford belongs to the ‘last generation of children
of the British Empire’ but that ‘the sun is finally setting. How can the Brits know what we
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