Not a biography.(Book Review)

Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and His Books, by Noel Henricksen; Random House Australia, 2004, $29.95.

CHRISTOPHER KOCH is Australia's greatest living novelist. Since the completion of his epic diptych Beware of the Past, composing the two novels Highways to a War and Out of Ireland, it has not been possible to construct an intellectually coherent refutation of this statement. Thus it would seem timely for a book about his life and works to appear. Whether Noel Henricksen is the ideal author for such a book is another question.

In his career as a novelist, Koch has not followed the uncomplicated rising trajectory other more fashionable figures have enjoyed. His first novel, The Boys in the Island (1958) was widely praised, earning its author the friendship and admiration of distinguished writers such as Kenneth Slessor and Hal Porter, and leading to a writing scholarship at Stanford University in California, where his classmates included Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry.

Yet Across the Sea Wall, his second novel, did not enjoy such an enthusiastic reception, and adverse comments made on the book (even though mainly unjust) greatly strengthened the faculty of self-criticism Koch already possessed, so that a projected third novel was abandoned after some seven years work on it. Thus there was an interval of thirteen years between the publication of Across the Sea Wall (1965) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1978).

The success of the third novel Koch published was such that even a quarter-century after its appearance it is rare for a week to go by without a newspaper headline recycling its memorable title. The title, though, is the least of the achievements in what is now regarded as an Australian classic; it is a novel which combines intellectual depth and rich use of language with a highly readable and exciting story.

The fact that his novels areas readable as any thriller has been held against Koch by certain of his critics, who imply that great literature should necessarily be difficult to digest. The implication can easily be refuted by reference to unquestioned major writers from Austen and Dickens to such near-contemporaries of Koch as William Maxwell and Patrick O'Brian, but the suggestion that he might be no more than a popular writer continues to rankle with Koch, in an aspect of his character--it is a reflection of the perfectionism which ensures that everything he writes is seamless in its construction and style--a biographer would do well to consider at length.

Henricksen does not. Though Island and Otherland is subtitled Christopher Koch and His Books, and ...