Update 11 April 2019: reread this novel for the second time in less than a year. It still stands apart, a strong rendering of a very personalized look at the wars in Southeast Asia during the Sixties and Seventies.

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Imaginative, this book about a quest to discover the fate of Mike Langford, an Australian journalist who has disappeared into Cambodia after the fall of the country to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Told through multiple points of view, Highways to a War operates a bit like a literary version of Citizen Kane. Beginning with Langford's childhood friend, Ray Barton, who has been tasked with tracking down Langford's whereabouts, you discover the boy behind the man in the harsh farmlands of Tasmania. The loss of a family and an early love serve as Langford's "Rosebud," the tangible childhood memory that gave insight into Charles Foster Kane's obsession to control people and possess things.

Yet Langford is someone who possesses virtually nothing materialistically and who devotes himself to idealistic causes often dismissed by other Western journalists and officials, from the down and out Singaporeans living and working on the city's wharves to the dismissed and unseen soldiers of the South Vietnamese army. Later, he takes up the cause of the Free Cambodian remnants who once backed Lon Nol but who become exiled to the fringes of the Thai-Cambodian border after the Khmer Rouge take over the country and institute a reign of terror. All the while, he has fallen for the seductions of a Vietnamese "dragon lady" at one point and a revenge minded Cambodian patriot who has lost her father to the Khmer Rouge a little while later.

The book is masterful at weaving the wars in Indochina into its landscape. And it has an epic feel to it, going from Tasmania to Singapore in the early 1960s, then to Saigon in 1965, Bangkok in 1976, and then back to Phnom Penh in 1973. But the reader will need to be somewhat familiar with the details and history of that time, for some of it is taken for granted--even though the novel was published in 1995. And this may be why the book has remained relatively obscure, unlike Koch's best known work, The Year of Living Dangrously, which also dealt with roughly the same time period in a more focused manner. Highways to a War was written for the generation that lived and knew the Vietnam War and the Cambodian genocide. Being a work of the mid 1990s, its readership was being replaced by a younger generation or a society that had turned its back on the turmoil of Southeast Asia in the 1960s-1970s and focused on the good times of the 1990s. Koch's novel was caught between then and right before the beginning of the terror wars of the twenty-first century.

It's a pity. Because this novel is superior in almost every way to other works on the wars in Southeast Asia. Its formal exploration of Langford from the differing perspectives of his closest friends, however, never leaves us with a full picture of the man. We see him from the view of his childhood best friend, his two fellow cameramen, and a close reporter friend. We even see him from his own confidences recorded into a tape recorder instead of a written diary. But there is still a mystery to him at the end. Why? Maybe because we never actually encounter Langford directly. And maybe because despite all the revelations about him, his ultimate motivations remain repressed in his own thoughts and memories. Much like Charles Foster Kane.

*Based upon the life of Australian cameraman and war correspondent Neil Davis, who was killed during a Bangkok coup attempt in 1985. ( )

Forgotten I had read this one. Excellent. Mine has a different cover. It was this book that led me to Koch's writing. His epic "Out of Ireland" is terrific = highly recommended. ( )

A brilliant book by a brilliant writer. Unforgettable. ( )

The Vietnam and Cambodian wars are seen through the eyes of several journalists and cameramen. The descriptions of battle skirmishes, and particularly the march after the capture of three of the media men, have a vividness and immediacy which put you right there. The war itself, though, is subordinate to the characters: its always there, sometimes in background but its the emotional foil against which the story is played out.

Christoper Koch is always well worth a read, and this book is no exception. ( )

I enjoyed this book. A fine novel and an excellent story about the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and the waste of lives and history and societies that resulted. Also, however, a story about love; about commitment, personal but also national or ideological commitment; about searching for identity; about the closeness that friendship can bring; about the strength of childhood ties on friendship.

The novel begins with the disappearance of Mike Langford, famous war photographer, in the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge. The story then build forward from Mike's youth, through the eyes of his friend, Ray Barton, to the climax of the truth of what happened to Mike. We rarely see Mike as himself, except as a young man, but rather he develops through the memories of friends (split on whether he is dead or can pull off another miraculous escape), and an audio diary that has been sent to Ray upon the assumption of his death.

It is also a description of the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia; critical of the US for both its political involvement and its conduct of the war: contrasting forays by South Vietnamese patrols for days on end in the countryside, with the quick in-and-out, pizza and ice-cream delivery, and home to base for beer in the evening, style of the US forces; descriptive of the general lack of contact and empathy even between the so-called allies of the US and the South, at the political and the personal levels; critical of what the massive US influx meant in societal change: the impact of prostitution, corruption, crime, drugs. Also nicely descriptive of the horror and waste of the war: juxtaposing the bombing raids from B-52s flying anonymously at 35,000 feet with the effect of their tonnages of bombs on the ground with villages obliterated, and the image of an old man holding the body of his daughter who is the last surviving member of his family: what is to become of him? what does he care about ideologies and containing communism? And the extension of the war into Cambodia (Koch acknowledges his debt to William Shawcross's Sideshow) where, having launched the horror, Koch depicts the US as leaving the people to their fate in the end, and what a fate it was with the terror of the Khmer Rouge.

And now here we are trading with our former enemies, opening embassies, and the "evil empire" is gone": but the scars and impacts of the wars are not, so what was it all for, in the end?

Mike Langford is an interesting person, and the reader comes to know him well. A difficult childhood, estranged from his father, drifting about without much aim in Indochina, then falling into the profession of war photographer and becoming the best. A friendly, reliable, always calm, self-sufficient person, but reserved; thwarted in love, first by his father, and then with others, he finally finds the true love of his live in a Cambodian woman and then loses her in the fall of Phenom Penh. At the same time the unravelling of his life is a story of finding political commitment, of how he steps over the bounds of neutrality demanded of the press (and their "guarantee" of safety) to take up the cause of the Free Khmer, to be, in the end, betrayed by his own countryman, an intelligence agent who will sacrifice any and all for his own interests.

I suppose the entire novel could be seen as a massive search for identity and the influences that throw people, and societies off track. Influences that we cannot control, nor foresee, but if we are the lucky ones, they are manageable and we can emerge without having caused harm to other people. But then, do we ever really emerge? Not as long as one is living some sort of sentient life.