ON THE TIDES OF HISTORY.

CHRISTOPHER KOCH'S DIPTYCH

IN THE BEGINNING, the two novels were one. Between conception and parturition, Christopher Koch separated Highways to a War (1995) from Out of Ireland (1999). Subtly but substantially, the books remain linked by what Koch has called "echoes", mirror-incidents, mutual illuminations and enhancements, resonance and reverberations--not essential for the independent life of each novel, but rewarding for the reader of both.

Out of Ireland purports to be a journal, written in two calfskin-bound notebooks by Robert Devereux, one of the Young Irelanders transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1848, having advocated "violent revolution" against the British government. Secreted in a writing-slope in his Derwent Valley property, Clare, when Devereux escapes his Vandemonian imprisonment, the diary is discovered a century later by his great-grandson, Michael Langford.

Europe, described in Devereux's journals, explodes with revolution, a Continental epidemic in which he has played a significant role, and where the fight for Irish independence is seen as "part of a larger music, our struggle just one theme in a symphony of revolt: a music reaching its climax in all those lands where Austrian power is being broken, and the Empire of the Habsburgs is dissolving." His chronicles ring with talismanic names like Metternich, Kossuth and Radetzky, and revolutionary hot-spots--Clerkenwell Green, the newly independent Bohemia, Frankfurt's Vorparlament.

There is, according to the historian E.J. Hobsbawm, a direct evolutionary pathway between the European tumult of 1848 and that "world-wide revolt against the West" which characterised the mid-twentieth century. While Devereux, in his diary, vividly documents cataclysmic events of 1848, his great-grandson will, through photographs, create images of the ultimate repercussions of the Year of Revolutions--in Vietnam and Cambodia. Each is enthused with a ferocious commitment to lost causes--to Irish freedom from British rule or to Khmer nationalism, and the ideals of both men issue in single-minded selflessness.

For Devereux, exile is the consequence of compassion for his oppressed and starving countrymen: his greatgrandson is executed for a similar identification with the victims of soulless totalitarianism. Each becomes "a little more than an ordinary human being", graduating into the realm of legend. By the time Devereux arrives in Van Diemen's Land, his exploits are already the stuff of broadsheet ballads and articles in the popular press. Langford achieves immortality when he is crucified by the Khmer Rouge near the Thai border.

Both men achieve legendary status within the violence of war or revolution: in common perception, Devereux is seen as a "bloodthirsty revolutionary"; while Langford is portrayed, carrying an M-16, apparently in charge of a cadre of Cambodian patriots. Paradoxically, both are ambivalent about violence: Devereux preaches the necessity of civil disorder and bloodshed, but he is personally unfamiliar with firearms, regarding armed resistance as a "final, desperate necessity ... a terrible and hateful necessity'; while Langford, in battle and bloody skirmishes, long resists the temptation to exchange his Leica for an AK-47.