Sunday, October 28, 2007

Two Books.

Reading is one of life’s great pleasures. That enjoyment is only enhanced when you are familiar with the setting of the novel in your hands.

Highways To A War, by Christopher J, Koch, is not a particularly recent work. But I came across it while moving recently and, remembering how much I enjoyed it the first time, decided to read it again.

Set in Vietnam and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, the novel evokes a lost post-French colonial world of decadence, elegance and outright weirdness against a backdrop of massive US bombing, ideological struggle and the disintegration of two societies under the stresses of massive military activity.

Koch, an Australian and a former journalist working in Asia during the 1960s and 1970s, is a master at capturing Asia of a certain period through the eyes of Westerners of a certain type. He wrote another indisputable classic, The Year of Living Dangerously, which painted a mesmerising picture of Jakarta in the same way as Highways To A War portrays Saigon and Phnom Penh. Both books are a must-read for anyone interested in the incredible modern events that shaped today’s Asia.

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