Adrift in a perilous kingdom: Christopher Koch's The Memory Room.

Few of us consciously make contact with that sub-world of espionage which is the myth kingdom of our century.

Thus MUSES THE NARRATOR, Cookie, in Christopher Koch's earlier novel The Year of Living Dangerously. Spies, and their secrets, make fleeting yet often important appearances in more than one Koch novel. Their elusive, background presence helps to create the sense of there being more than one meaning to events; their shadowy imperatives can seem almost otherworldly, a gnostic theatre hidden behind the screen of everyday life, and a pale reflection of the grander metaphysical theatre of the eternal struggle between good and evil. As well, many Koch novels feature spy-like professional observers--journalists, researchers and such--as ambiguous narrators and commenters, as well as peripheral actors in the drama. But The Memory Room is the first time that an actual spy is centre stage, and this fact creates an atmosphere that is both richly and intensely familiar, and yet also arrestingly strange.

The Memory Room is the story of three childhood friends: Vincent Austin, who is recruited at university for ASIS, the overseas-focused branch of the Australian secret services; Erika Lange, his closest, dearest friend, who becomes a famous journalist; and Derek Bradley, who joins the Department of Foreign Affairs and becomes a diplomat. Bradley, the "most normal" of the three, is the one who is left to tell the story--and learn its full ramifications--after the other two have passed out of the picture, for various reasons. A sometime lover of the mercurial, disturbed and disturbing Erika, Bradley is also a sensual counterpoint to Vincent, who is almost monk-like, asexual and ascetic despite his complete lack of puritanism.

Vincent loves Erika dearly, but not in a sexual way; she loves him dearly too, and he is the only one who understands her completely. Early on, we are told Vincent lost his mother at birth and his twin brother Douglas at the age of eight; Erika has become, in a sense, his lost twin, his alter ego, his anima, his soul mate. After they grow up, Bradley somewhat loses touch with the others; but their lives intersect again in China in the early 1980s, where certain events--and a disastrous decision by Vincent--will change everything forever.

The attraction of the spy as a central character is a strong one for a novelist. Novelists of course are also spies of a sort: watching and listening to people in secret is part of the job description. I think that many of us also flatter ourselves that we could be real spies, if push came to shove. And though that's a complacent fantasy, by and large, it's true that some of us have been spies, both in the past and now: think of John Buchan, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ian Fleming, Vladimir Volkoff, John le Carre, and most recently, the ex-chief of MI5, Stella Rimington, and ex-ASIS operative Warren Reed (who was one of the sources for Koch's novel).

Most of these writers, however, with the exceptions of Greene, Volkoff, Maugham and le Carre, chose mainly to frame the experiences they gained in the intelligence services in the guise of more or less conventional spy thrillers. Even those four don't frame the narrative almost entirely within the world of espionage. But what the reader encounters in The Memory Room, while it is as gripping as a thriller, is an extraordinary, multi-layered, beautifully written story where the central mystery is not one of espionage revelations or superpower machinations (though we get glimpses and echoes of these, and some very interesting and wide-ranging political discussions), but the central mystery of Being, the journey of the soul.

Like Vincent Austin, the novel asks: Is a spy born, or made? On the surface, this may seem like the old nature-versus-nurture conundrum. But it is a spy's question, and thus not straightforward. Is it a strength or a flaw that makes someone a good spy? Is it a gift or a curse? Many, maybe most, people cannot keep even ordinary secrets. Their actions are often reactions, and so predictable, easily manipulated. Or so it could be seen by a spy. The gnosis of espionage is intensely attractive to guarded, clever, cool personalities, like Vincent's, and yet that gnosis is also intensely attractive to deluded and disturbed people, fantasists, crackpot believers in conspiracy theories and secret messages and hidden histories.