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.