Crossing the Gap: A Novelist's Essays

by Christopher J. Koch

Hardcover. Minor foxing on jacket's rear inner flap. Pages are clean and sound. TS

Genres: Australia

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Christopher Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. For a good deal of his life he was a broadcasting producer, working for the ABC in Sydney. He has lived and worked in London and elsewhere overseas. He has been a fulltime writer since 1972, winning international praise and a number of awards for his novels, many of which are translated in a number of European countries. One of his novels, The YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY, was made into a film by Peter Weir and was nominated for an Academy Award. He has twice won the Miles Franklin award for fiction: for THE DOUBLEMAN and HIGHWAYS TO A WAR. In 1995 Koch was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature.

Reviews

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essay on London alone is worth the price of admission. The intense fervour that the Capital conjured up in young minds in the remotest corners of Empire (and you literally can’t go any further than Tasmania), followed by the horrid shock of actual encounter: the bombed-out squalor and sour-lipped austerity that defined life in London as late as the mid-50s. This is as good as Orwell and Selvon’s writings on the city, the latter the voice of the black and brown masses who would soon flood into London in waves, not long after the young Anglo from Australia.

Koch is also superb on the subject of Tasmania specifically (and Australia more broadly), which are the inspiration for three fine essays. Among other things, he led me directly to Marcus Clarke and Hal Porter, re which much anticipation. He is sympathetic to F Scott F, and antithetical to the cruel and egomaniacal Ernest Hemingway; he also has interesting things to say about the evolution of the novel in modern times.

The Stanford writing program of 1960-1961, with its stellar cast led by Kesey and McMurtry, is lovingly evoked but the "stubborn square" from the far end of the world refused to be seduced by the mantra of turn on tune in drop out. This leads, via Hermann Hesse, to the most moralistic and weakest essay in the collection (Mysteries), an inspired but unconvincing ramble about the role and possibilities of the Christian novelist.

I much prefer the Koch of Tasmania and postwar London. Maybe his Asia novels will be interesting too if I can get hold of them.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had its moments, but it mainly meandered along. Interesting in parts, but not in others

[David O'Connell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a dull essay amongst them.
A truly great Australian writer and thinker.