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Harvey Drummond describes the strange but essential influence people like Langford
have on others: ‘they haunt us’, he says in appropriate, ghost-story idiom, but describing at the
same time the function of a saviour to overcome the threat of an end to time. ‘We grow old,
we shrivel up, we die; we’re a sad lot of creatures, ultimately; and yet certain human faces can
make us disbelieve it—or at least forget it for a while’ (HW, 180). Saviours too resemble
ghosts in some ways, but are neither mischievous nor evil beings. They are
very human, yet a little more than human, in some way. They talk in an
ordinary manner, these people: they eat; laugh; walk in the streets; sit in a pool
of sun in a coffee shop, or the artificial light of a bar: yet nothing dissolves the
film of strangeness that surrounds them. (HW, 179-80)
Drummond wonders then, ‘How are they different?’, and his answers point back to the
themes of time and the harmony of dharma. ‘They change our lives like music; they put time
and disappointment on hold; they even make us forget that final sadness of reality, and of our
miserable physical decline.’ As to how they captivate those around them, he suggests ‘a
particular shape of eye; a smile; a set of the mouth’ and most importantly ‘the spirit behind the
face: by a sort of easy daring, an always lighthearted ease with life that’s magical’. All of this
boils down to something like the avatara myth of the reincarnation of a great soul.
It’s a face which in its youth—recurring in many variations, male and
female—can never be devalued, never obliterated. Growing old, disappearing,
it’s always replaced. No telling where it will reappear, in the famous or the
obscure. In the end, it’s beyond analysis. It’s what makes us immortal. (HW,
180)
This, Drummond argues, is the key to understanding Mike Langford. Yet, it is not an
avatara myth, for Koch gives no indication that Langford represents anything more than the
return of his great-great grandfather, an Anglo-Irish political activist who is transported to Van
Diemen’s Land—an interesting, probably heroic figure, but still no Vishnu. Nevertheless,
Koch is creating a mythical character on the lines of the Asian reincarnation concept by
emphasising how Langford’s story extends far beyond the limits of the life of one individual.
Langford, he says, ‘like all of us, is not just himself by a product of ancestors. Not only
physical characteristics but the ancestors themselves recur in us, their spirits are inside us’
(Mitchell, 1996, Interview, 72).
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