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feel, we children of the old Dominions? It was always unrequited love; and now the beloved is
departing’ (HW, 92-93).
The Asian future awaiting Australia is a Siren figure, an irresistible force drawing the
wayfarer to his death. Mike Langford arrives in Singapore thinking, ‘This is the place I’ve
always been waiting for’ (HW, 69), but when he arrives in Vietnam for his first job it is like
descending into Hell:
Coming down the gangway, squinting in the blinding heat that rebounded from
the tarmac, greeted by smells of aviation fuel and the roar of afterburners,
Leica round his neck, camera bag over his shoulder, Langford was entering his
future: that war whose remorseless sequences would devour the rest of his life.
(HW, 99)
The war is devouring not just the rest of Langford’s but everyone’s lives. Inside the
artificial environment of JUSPAO, the American public affairs office, the air-conditioning
freezes time as well as space, leaving the journalists to sit waiting for their press conferences
‘like aging students’ (HW, 190). War-torn Saigon itself is seen by Harvey Drummond as
‘exhausted now: debauched; doomed; threatening’, a landscape whose ‘time got lost down a
funnel’ (HW, 195)
Neither people nor places age properly. Mike Langford is consistently described as
looking too young for his age. Ray Barton sees recent photos of Langford before his
disappearance in Cambodia, and notices that ‘Langford looked nearer to twenty-eight than
forty’(HW, 9), that his face had ‘the strong planes of adulthood, and yet it was still very
boyish’ (HW, 50), and still, Barton notices, somehow Langford ‘already looks dead’ (HW, 9).
Koch spices the novel with such details as that the helplessly broke Langford is waiting
for a cheque to come from the newspaper called the Age (HW, 82), and that the ARVN soldiers
‘treated me like a kid, on that first patrol: one who needed help with the simplest things (HW,
139). He emphasises the casual youth of the NVA soldiers who capture Langford, Feng and
Volkov, describing the enemy as ‘laughing, exchanging jokes and cigarettes and even
clowning with each other like schoolboys’ (HW, 317). Yet, the disjointedness of the
appearances of age is never to be taken lightly, but is a sign of the collapse of the cosmic order.
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