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Westerners are not exempted from the attraction to Langford. In the photo hanging in
the Foxhole Bar in Bangkok he ‘looks supernaturally young, and at the same time like a man
from a much earlier era’. The memorial which the journalists have chosen to hang of Langford
‘seems idealized, and has the appearance of an icon’ (HW, 203). Harvey Drummond is one of
Langford’s admirers, and devotes a lot of time to explaining the attraction he had ‘for men and
women alike’. It was more than his ‘unusual risk taking, his quick success, and his blond,
country-style good looks’, he reasons. ‘It had something to do with the soft-spoken, uncanny
amiability which had made me feel safe. It was something he extended to everybody: a sort of
low-key yet vital affection; a calm concern.’ The closest Drummond can get to explaining his
sense of who Langford is resides in his description of Langford’s unconscious face after being
hit during a firefight in South Vietnam:
Dead white, the blood cleaned away from it, the heavy eyelids closed under
their high-arched brows, it had become a different face. It resembled a piece
of nineteenth-century sculpture, I thought: one of those pieces deriving from
classical antiquity. It was a face that tended to change a lot: did you ever
notice that? He could appear plain or good looking; tough or sensitive:
sensitive to the point of being feminine. (HW, 179)
Drummond is putting together various pieces of the puzzle Koch is creating about Mike
Langford, the reincarnation of his nineteenth-century great-grandfather, perhaps even an avatar
of classical Indian tradition, whose dualities mirror the descriptions of Shiva or Vishnu. He
says it has to do with ‘mortality and its opposite’, leaving the distinct problem of just what the
‘opposite of mortality’ is open. If it is life beyond the limits of time, making Langford
therefore an avatar, that is, the reincarnation of a great spirit sent to restore dharma, then his
story would be one of redeeming the world from the adharmic rule of the demons. If, on the
other hand, the opposite of mortality is the inability to die, then Koch’s novel becomes a
traditional, Western ghost story. The evidence is there to indicate it is at least partially the
latter.
Ray Barton says that, as children, playing hide and go seek with Mike Langford ‘was
like hunting something gone insubstantial’ (HW, 33). As an adult he remains evanescent.
Harvey Drummond reports, ‘He suddenly materialized among us, standing in the middle of the
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