The Year of Living Dangerously by C. J. Koch
"The Year of Living Dangerously" by C. J. Koch is a political and personal narrative set in Indonesia during the pivotal year of 1965, when President Sukarno was overthrown by General Suharto. The story unfolds through the eyes of R. J. Cook, the first-person narrator, who details the intertwining lives of several key characters: Guy Hamilton, a foreign news correspondent; Billy Kwan, his devoted cameraman; and Jill Bryant, the woman caught in a love triangle between the two men. The novel explores themes of ambition, betrayal, and the complexities of personal relationships against a backdrop of political turmoil.
The narrative juxtaposes personal dilemmas with the wider socio-political climate, revealing how individual actions are often shaped by larger forces. Billy Kwan's admiration for Sukarno contrasts sharply with the harsh realities of his policies, leading him to a tragic end. Throughout, Koch employs metaphors of puppetry and duality to deepen the exploration of identity and power dynamics, suggesting a broader commentary on exploitation and neocolonialism faced by Indonesian society. The novel, which gained further recognition through a 1982 film adaptation featuring Mel Gibson, remains a significant work within the canon of Australian literature, reflecting on historical events while probing the nature of human relationships in times of crisis.
The Year of Living Dangerously by C. J. Koch
First published: 1978
Type of work: Political romance
Time of work: 1965
Locale: Indonesia, primarily Jakarta
Principal Characters:
Guy Hamilton , the protagonist, a correspondent for ABS, an Australian news agencyBilly Kwan , a dwarf, Guy’s cameraman and friendJill Bryant , a secretary at the British Embassy, who is in love with GuyColonel Henderson , a British military attacheR. J. Cook , the narrator, a newspaper correspondentWally O’Sullivan , a correspondent with an interest in Indonesian boysPete Curtis , a correspondent who is addicted to prostitutesSukarno , the Indonesian rulerKumar , Guy’s assistant, a dedicated CommunistVera Chostiakov , a cultural attache in the Russian EmbassyIbu , a poor Indonesian woman adopted by Billy, a symbol for the Indonesian poor
The Novel
C. J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously takes its title from Sukarno’s term for 1965, the year in which the novel takes place. R. J. Cook, Koch’s first-person narrator, recounts the events—both political and personal—that occurred during that tumultuous, chaotic year in which Sukarno was overthrown and Suharto, a right-wing officer, assumed control of the Indonesian government. Sukarno’s fate, however, is inextricably linked to the fates of Guy Hamilton, Billy Kwan, and Jill Bryant. In effect, there are two parallel plots which are connected by Billy Kwan, who sees himself in Sukarno and Guy—both of whom, he believes, betray him.
On the “domestic” level, the plot concerns the personal and professional relationships of Guy, the news correspondent; Billy, his cameraman; and Jill, the woman both men love. When Guy arrives in Jakarta, Billy secures an interview for him with Aidit, the leader of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party, thereby establishing Guy as a threat to Wally O’Sullivan’s primacy as Indonesian news correspondent. Billy also introduces Guy to Jill Bryant and, even though he says that he has proposed to her, encourages their relationship, which flourishes, despite Colonel Henderson, who also is in love with Jill, and Pete Curtis, whose prurient remarks about Jill disturb the somewhat prudish and romantic Guy. The relationship is threatened, however, by Guy’s actions: Once Jill tells him of a Chinese arms shipment to the Indonesian peasants, he is compelled to investigate the story, even though his investigation violates Jill’s trust and threatens her position. Although he knows that Jill is pregnant, Guy leaves her to go to Java with his assistant, Kumar, who brings along Vera Chostiakov, an obvious Russian agent intent on seducing and using Guy. Despite Guy’s behavior, which Billy regards as a betrayal of trust, Guy is reunited with Jill and promises to leave the country with her. His career ambitions, however, again intrude when the Communists revolt against Sukarno’s rule. While covering the coup, he is wounded and almost loses the sight in one eye, but he eventually makes it to the plane and rejoins Jill.
Billy is even less fortunate in his misplaced faith in Sukarno, who he believes is the savior of the Indonesian people. Billy maintains that Sukarno walks the tightrope between the Right and the Left while he actually supports Marhaeniam, the peasantry. So convinced is he of Sukarno’s commitment to the poor that he is duped by Sukarno’s rhetoric and blind to the real lack of action—and, ironically, Billy’s own photographs document Sukarno’s failure. As Billy removes himself from the Guy-Jill relationship, he involves himself in the lives of Ibu and her children. As Cook observes, “Ibu appears to have become a personification” for “the Jakarta poor”—at least to Billy. When one of Ibu’s children dies and Ibu leaves Jakarta, Billy makes the connection, which has existed before him in the juxtaposition of the photographs of Sukarno and Ibu, between her fate and Sukarno’s failure. Cook observes that Billy was gripped by “two parallel obsessions”: one, “his growing doubt over Sukarno’s policies for Indonesia” (and this is constantly linked with his concern for the well-being of Ibu and her children), and the other his “strange” interest in the affair between Guy and Jill. The obsessions lead Billy to a “wild disappointment,” which culminates in his futile attempt to confront Sukarno with his failure and in his subsequent murder by government agents.
The Characters
The characters Cook describes are the products of his interaction with them and his access to Billy’s files, which Cook had taken after the Sukarno coup and which he has been studying in the ten years that have elapsed between 1965 and the writing of the novel. In his files, Billy consciously connects himself, through the controlling metaphor of puppetry and through references to myth and legend, to both Sukarno and Guy. As creator and “master” of the files, Billy believes that he controls peoples’ lives: “I can shuffle like cards the lives I deal with.” In addition to his files, Billy has some archetypal puppets which represent many of the principals in the novel.
The tie between the wayang, the traditional Indonesian shadow show, replete with puppets, and the contemporary political theater is explicit in the Jakarta Sports Stadium, which is a “sort of theatre.” In that drama, Sukarno plays the play of Bung Karno, with “Bung” being the archetypal daring older brother who “carries out every outrageous scheme” the Indonesians “had ever longed for.” Not only is Sukarno an actor but also he serves as the dalang, the puppet-master in charge of the shadow show; at his retreat, in fact, Sukarno often represents his ministers as characters in a shadow show. In his role of dalang, Sukarno resembles Billy, another master puppeteer; Billy elaborates on their resemblance: “I’m Gemini—the same sign as Sukarno. He and I have two faces—the hard and the sentimental.” When Billy steals Wally O’Sullivan’s “Sukarno hat” and wears it, his identification with Sukarno is complete.
Billy’s relationship to Guy, since it is personal rather than political, is more intense and complex. At first a professional “partnership,” with Billy serving as Guy’s “eyes,” the relationship quickly becomes almost mythic: Wally O’Sullivan dubs them “Sir Guy and the Black Dwarf.” Wally’s ironic use of Arthurian material is particularly apt since Billy’s own exhaustive research on dwarfs contains mythological references to the origins of the Arthurian dwarf. As Cook points out in a footnote, Billy’s recurring references to Guy as a “giant brother” can be traced to the ancient dwarf-figure Pelles, who was split into two men—“a knight and his dwarf squire.” Cook’s footnote suggests that Guy and Billy are one, that each is incomplete without the other, that they are alter egos, and that, consequently, one may live, albeit vicariously, through the other. Since Billy cannot possess Jill, the wayang “princess,” his decision to encourage Guy’s pursuit of Jill is understandable. Equally understandable is Billy’s reaction when Guy, whom Billy believed, in his wayang categorizing of characters, to be a man of light rather than a man of darkness, enters “Durga’s darkness” and betrays Jill. (Billy’s belief in a world of black and white is at odds with the ambiguity that characterizes Indonesia and people’s hearts.) Billy exclaims, “I should have been him,” and later, in his role as puppet-master, he tells Guy, “I created you.” His comment, indicative of his frustration, is that of a petty god whose creature falls from grace and cannot make the necessary commitment to love.
In addition to the wayang characters, the subject of his drama, Koch uses the various news correspondents to dramatize a political theme, exploitation and neocolonialism. In Sukarno’s world of propaganda, Guy and his colleagues are “NEKOLIM,” neocolonial imperialists who serve as agents for the “OLDEFOS,” the old established forces. Almost by definition, the correspondent exploits and sacrifices in order to “get the story”; certainly, Guy’s treatment of Jill’s “tip,” which was prompted by her concern for him, reflects his elevation of news over personal ties. Guy’s colleagues also epitomize the exploitation of the Indonesian people: Pete Curtis frequents the Indonesian prostitutes; Condon photographs poor Indonesian women not because they are appropriate symbols of poverty (as Billy does), but because he is obsessed with their breasts; and Wally O’Sullivan uses Indonesian boys to satisfy his sexual appetite. The correspondents live apart from the Indonesians; the Hotel Indonesia resembles a “luxury ship in mid-ocean.” When they leave their privileged Wayang Bar and visit the local bars, they do not enter into Indonesian life. Instead, they mimic the betjak drivers and even hire a dwarf, whom they regard as a possession, to taunt Guy and Billy. Indonesia is only the source of news, and when Vietnam proves to be a more exploitable resource, Pete Curtis is not alone in hoping for a transfer.
Critical Context
In The Year of Living Dangerously, his third novel (the first two were The Boys in the Island, 1958, and Across the Sea Wall, 1965), Koch draws on his experiences in Indonesia in 1968, when he helped develop an Indonesian educational broadcasting network. Although not a prolific writer—his only other novel is The Doubleman (1985)—Koch is a major Australian novelist by virtue of The Year of Living Dangerously, which was adapted to film in 1982. The film, which starred Australian actor Mel Gibson, enhanced the novel’s success and brought it to the attention of a larger audience. Although set in Indonesia, the novel, with its political intrigue, its conflict between Right and Left, and its neocolonial exploitation, calls Vietnam to mind.
In his fourth novel, The Doubleman, Koch returns to one of the themes of The Year of Living Dangerously: the Double. Broderick, the “doubleman,” comes to personify the duality and duplicity in the world; in fact, all the characters in the novel seem to be doubles. Thus, the doubling reflected in Billy’s relationships with Sukarno and Guy becomes the major metaphor of Koch’s next novel. The Doubleman also concerns the events of the 1960’s; a reviewer has praised Koch’s ability “to make an exactly caught phase of history symbolic of a larger reality.’ That ability to relate historical events to a “larger reality” is certainly in evidence in The Year of Living Dangerously.
Bibliography
Koch, C. J. “An Australian Writer Speaks,” in Westerly. III (1980), pp. 69-75.
Sharrad, Paul. “Pour mieux sauter: Christopher Koch’s Novels in Relation to White, Stow, and the Quest for a Post-Colonial Fiction,” in World Literature Written in English. XXIII (1984), pp. 208-223.
Tiffin, Helen. “Asia, Europe and Australian Identity: The Novels of Christopher Koch,” in Australian Literary Studies. X (1982), pp. 326-335.