Volltext - ub-dok: der Dokumentenserver der UB Trier - Universität ...

which is to say spiritually alive. In such a face is the evidence of the soul of humanity’
(Mitchell, 1996, Ancestral Voices, 7).
Koch drives home the feeling that Mike has somehow escaped from time and mortality
through the persevering faith of Jim Feng, whose ‘Oriental, even Confucian view, without the
doubts and second thoughts of the Western witnesses’, holds ever to the fact that his
disappearance has never been resolved. That, Mitchell notes, ‘is an escape from time and
mortality, an apotheosis that takes place in the minds of the witnesses (and reinforced by the
unconfirmed reports that he had been crucified by the Khmer Rouge, les autres)’ (Mitchell,
1996, Ancestral Voices, 9). The apotheosis, Koch insists, is only in the minds of Langford’s
old close colleagues and admirers. Even while Mitchell is absolutely correct to write that he
somehow escapes time and mortality, one is left confronted with the unsatisfactory image of
Langford hanging on the cross in the Khmer Rouge killing field, and wondering if Koch has
gone to all this trouble working Eastern images and symbols into his novel only to end up with
a trite and rather glib Christ-symbol.
Obviously not. And though Langford is a symbol of sacrifice, his crucifixion is a
mockery by the Khmer Rouge of the sacrificial rite. Just what Langford is, indeed, remains the
question at the centre of the novel, but the answer must be assembled by the reader. C. J. Koch
loves puzzles, and the pieces of Mike Langford’s identity are strewn all over the novel. Koch
is not, however, the type of writer to leave such a puzzle unresolvable, and so, while preparing
Langford’s role with all of the above-mentioned details, Koch shows us exactly what Langford
is in a few short, subtle passages.
13.8. The ‘Buffalo Boy’: Koch’s Agnus Dei
The first piece is in the narrative of Harvey Drummond, who tells about when he,
Langford and two other journalists travel out from Phnom Penh to cover a battle, followed by
other journalists who know that Langford knows where the action will be. The action, at first,
is no action at all. The Cambodian Army command post ‘proved to be a thatch-roofed peasant
hut’ standing before a ‘little grove of coconut palms’. The only movement is of the chickens
- 361 -